a cord that works by being pulled tight: the rope that holds a tent up, or the string of a bow.
This is the rope that holds a tent up. It runs from the edge of the fabric down to a peg driven into the ground, and it does its job only by being stretched tight. Six of the word's nine appearances sit in the tabernacle inventories of Exodus and Numbers, where the cords are counted off beside the pegs, the posts, and the hangings: plain hardware for a sanctuary that has to be taken down, carried, and set up again.
What holds the uses together is tension rather than the material the rope is made of.
- A tent stands only while its ropes are pulled tight against the pegs.
- A household loses everything the moment those ropes are cut.
- A bow is dead weight until its string is drawn taut.
That is why the prophets reach for the word. Isaiah 54:2 tells a city with no children to lengthen her cords and drive her pegs in harder, because the tent is about to be too small for the family that is coming. Jeremiah 10:20 turns the same picture over: the tent is wrecked, the cords are snapped, the children are gone. Neither passage gives the word a new meaning; both work because every listener knew what happens when one of those ropes goes.
Once, in Psalm 21:12, the word names a bowstring instead. It is the same kind of object seen from a different angle, a line stretched to its limit and holding, and Hebrew treats the two as one idea: the closely related word for a tent rope (יֶתֶר) covers bowstrings too.