mattarah

The word names the fixed point that an arrow is aimed at. Its one everyday use is part of a coded signal: Jonathan tells David he will shoot three arrows off to the side of David's hiding place, as though he were aiming at a mark, so that what David really has to watch is where the boy is sent to fetch them.

Twice the picture is turned on a person, and both times the archer is God. Job says he had been living at ease when God took him by the neck, shook him to pieces, and then stood him up as a target. The poet of Lamentations says God bent the bow and set him as the mark for the arrow. What stings in both is not the wound but the aim: an archer chooses what to shoot at, so the suffering cannot be brushed off as an accident.

This same word carries a second meaning, a guard post, and the two probably meet in the idea of a fixed gaze. The verb they both grow from (נָטַר) means to keep or watch over something. A guard is someone whose eyes stay on a place; a target is the thing eyes stay on. Nothing in these three verses depends on that link, and no passage in the Bible plays on the double sense.

In this meaning the word never stands on its own. It turns up only inside two place names, and each one marks a spot where a watch was kept: the court of the guard, and the Gate of the Guard in Jerusalem's wall.

Almost every verse here belongs to a single story. While Babylon's army was besieging Jerusalem, King Zedekiah had Jeremiah shut up in a courtyard attached to the palace, under military watch. It was real custody, but it was not a dungeon:

• his cousin could walk in and sell him a field,
• he could dictate a deed and have witnesses sign it in front of onlookers,
• he was issued a loaf of bread a day for as long as any bread was left in the city,
• and further messages from God kept reaching him there.

When his enemies did want him dead, they lowered him into a muddy cistern inside that same courtyard, and once he had been hauled out he was returned to the courtyard itself, where he stayed until the city fell.

About a century and a half later Nehemiah's builders repair the wall beside a court of the guard by the old royal palace, most likely the same one, and the procession at the wall's dedication comes to a halt at the Gate of the Guard. By then these are simply landmarks, the way a street can still be called Barracks Lane long after the soldiers have gone.