StrongerBible

malqosh

מַלְקוֹשׁ

HebrewH4456“spring rain, latter rain, ...”

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Deu 11:14Job 29:23Pro 16:15Jer 3:3Jer 5:24Hos 6:3Jol 2:23Zec 10:1
Root family
Word studyResearch-grademal-KOHSHnoun

What malqosh means

the last rain of the wet season, falling in March and April, that fills out the grain in the few weeks before harvest

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled

In the land of the Bible the year splits cleanly in two: a rainless summer and a wet winter. Farmers named the rains separately, and this word is the name of the last one. It falls in a narrow window at the very end of the wet season, only a few weeks before the barley and wheat are cut. The amount of water is small, but the timing is everything, because this is the rain that fills out the heads of grain. If it comes, there is a harvest. If it fails, half a year of work comes to nothing.

That is why the word belongs to the Bible's vocabulary of blessing and judgment rather than to its weather reports. Every time it appears, something is at stake between God and his people. It is promised for obedience in Deuteronomy 11:14, withheld from a nation that still refuses to be ashamed in Jeremiah 3:3, given to people who never think to thank the giver in Jeremiah 5:24, restored after locusts and drought in Joel 2:23, and named as the one thing Judah should ask God for instead of consulting household idols in Zechariah 10:1.

Three writers turn the rain into a picture, and each borrows the same feeling of a long wait ending in relief:

  • Hosea says God will come to his people as surely and as revivingly as this rain waters the ground (Hosea 6:3).
  • Job remembers listeners who gaped open for his words the way drought-cracked earth gapes for the spring showers (Job 29:23).
  • Proverbs says a king's favor is like the cloud that carries this rain, a promise of good still on its way (Proverbs 16:15).

The word belongs to a small family of rain words that are not interchangeable. The autumn rain (יוֹרֶה) breaks up sun-baked ground so seed can be sown; the winter rain (גֶּשֶׁם) is the heavy drenching that soaks the land through; this word closes the sequence. Proverbs compares royal favor elsewhere to dew (טַל), which is nightly upkeep, and the contrast is deliberate: this rain is the once-a-year rescue that settles whether there will be a crop at all.

Nuances

1athe rain itself as an event in the farming year: sent in season, held back, or asked for
Deu 11:14Jer 3:3Jer 5:24Jol 2:23Zec 10:1
Jol 2:23

Whether Joel 2:23 promises rain throughout, or whether its opening word announces a teacher of righteousness, which would place this occurrence of the spring rain inside a messianic promise rather than a straightforwardly agricultural one.

  • majorityThe verse is about rain from beginning to end: the opening word is the autumn rain, the parallel clause names the autumn and spring rains together, and the surrounding oracle reverses the locust plague and drought of chapters 1 and 2. The choice of an unusual spelling activates a pun on the root that also yields "teach," but the pun is a secondary echo, not the primary sense.; James L. Crenshaw, Joel, AB 24C (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 152-164; John Barton, Joel and Obadiah, OTL (Louisville: WJK, 2001), 88-94; Douglas Stuart, Hosea-Jonah, WBC 31 (Waco: Word, 1987), 258-261; Elie Assis, The Book of Joel: A Prophet between Calamity and Hope, LHBOTS 581 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 176-184
  • minorityThe opening word names a teacher of righteousness, so the verse announces a person as well as, or instead of, a season of rain. This is the reading of the Vulgate and the Targum, and the sobriquet used by the Qumran community appears to draw on it.; Michael A. Rydelnik, "The Teacher of Righteousness: A Messianic Interpretation of Joel 2:23," Bibliotheca Sacra 176 (2019): 164-178; Vulgate, Joel 2:23 (doctorem iustitiae)
  • minorityThe opening phrase is corrupt and should be emended on the evidence of the Greek and Syriac to read "food in right measure," leaving the rains named only in the second half of the verse.; Hans Walter Wolff, Joel and Amos, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 55, 62-65
1bthe same rain used as a comparison, for something long awaited that arrives just in time and brings life with it
Job 29:23Pro 16:15Hos 6:3

What scholars say about malqosh

The word occurs eight times and the lexicographic tradition is unusually unified. BDB glosses "latter-rain, spring-rain (showers of March-April; important, as strengthening and maturing crops)," relating it to the general term for rain as particular to general; HALOT specifies the late rain of February to April, "vital for the ripening of the grain"; the eighteenth-edition Gesenius reads Spaetregen, the rain that promotes ripening in March and April; DCH lists the eight occurrences under "latter rain, spring rain" without an independent etymology. The consensus derivation is from the root l-q-sh, "to be late; to gather the after-crop," thinly attested in Biblical Hebrew but visible in the verb at Job 24:6 and the noun for the after-growth at Amos 7:1, and confirmed epigraphically by line 3 of the tenth-century Gezer Calendar, which counts "two months of late sowing" immediately before the barley harvest. The noun is formed on the mem-preformative pattern Hebrew uses for nouns of time or characteristic phenomenon. Cognates cluster in Aramaic and Syriac (Targum Onkelos at Genesis 30:42 for late-born flocks, cited by Rashi at Deuteronomy 11:14; Syriac malqosha as the exact cognate), while Ugaritic and Akkadian yield none, which is why the root is treated as a Canaanite-Aramaic isogloss rather than a proto-Semitic inheritance. The often-cited Arabic laqisa is a false cognate on phonological grounds, though marginal Arabic and Levantine dialect entries under l-q-sh do support a genuine reflex. The ancient versions agree throughout: the Greek renders with opsimos ("late"), usually paired with proimos for the autumn rain; the Vulgate uses imber serotinus, a precise calque; the Peshitta uses the exact cognate. Neither TDOT nor TLOT devotes an article to the term, treating it within the general entry on matar, which reflects a scholarly judgment that its weight lies in its agrarian and covenantal function rather than in independent theological freight. On the individual passages, Tigay and Weinfeld read Deuteronomy 11:14 as a treaty-style blessing with an anti-Baal edge, since Canaan, unlike Nile-watered Egypt, depended on rain from YHWH alone; Lundbom, Holladay, and McKane read Jeremiah 3:3 as an activation of the Deuteronomic curse and Jeremiah 5:24 as its inversion, with the "weeks appointed for harvest" naming the seven-week count between Passover and Shavuot that the late rain bounds; Andersen and Freedman parse the following word at Hosea 6:3 as a participle ("watering the earth") rather than a second rain-noun, while Macintosh surveys the medieval Jewish exegetes who preferred the noun. Meyers and Meyers read the imperative at Zechariah 10:1 as authorizing petition as the alternative to the household idols condemned in the next verse, and Petersen and Boda note that Zechariah singles out the late rain alone precisely because it is the agriculturally decisive moment. In the wisdom books both occurrences convert the agrarian anxiety into simile: Pope treats the rain word-pair at Job 29:23 as a stereotyped image for life-giving speech, Dhorme reads the second line as a heightening from generic rain to the specifically awaited pre-harvest rain, and Habel classes Job 29:21-25 as a portrait of the ideal ruler; at Proverbs 16:15 Fox notes that the cloud, not the rain, is the harbinger, and Waltke and Clifford stress the intensification over the dew image of Proverbs 19:12. The live disagreement concerns Joel 2:23, where the root behind the opening word fuses "to water" and "to teach": Crenshaw, Barton, Stuart, Allen, Simkins, and Assis defend the meteorological reading while granting the deliberate wordplay, Wolff emends on Greek and Syriac grounds, and the messianic reading of the Vulgate, the Targum, the Qumran sobriquet, and later Jewish exegesis (Ibn Ezra, Radak, Abarbanel) is best described, with Strazicich, as inner-biblical and post-biblical reception rather than the prophet's primary intent. Rabbinic tradition at b. Taanit 6a preserves three etymologies at once, of which the "late season" derivation is the historically correct one and the other two are homiletic puns.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDB (Brown, Driver, Briggs), A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 545, s.v. מַלְקוֹשׁlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler, Baumgartner, Stamm), The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), 2:594lexicon
  • W. Gesenius, Hebraeisches und Aramaeisches Handwoerterbuch ueber das Alte Testament, 18th ed., ed. H. Donner and R. Meyer (Berlin: Springer, 1987-2012), Lieferung IV, 668lexicon
  • D. J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 5 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 335lexicon
  • M. J. Mulder, "מָטָר," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. VIII (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 250-265, esp. 258-260theological-dictionary
  • Oded Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1987), 31-44, 47-56, 87-97monograph
  • Shmuel Ahituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008), 252-257reference-work
  • W. F. Albright, "The Gezer Calendar," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 92 (1943): 16-26journal-article
  • Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy / Devarim, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: JPS, 1996), 111-112commentary
  • Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1-11, AB 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 447-448commentary
  • Peter C. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 210-211commentary
  • Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 1-20, AB 21A (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 302-303, 405-406commentary
  • William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 1, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 114-115, 195commentary
  • William McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah I-XXV, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), 61-63, 130-132commentary
  • Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Hosea, AB 24 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1980), 421-422commentary
  • A. A. Macintosh, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Hosea, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 220-224commentary
  • James L. Crenshaw, Joel, AB 24C (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 152-164commentary
  • Hans Walter Wolff, Joel and Amos, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 55, 62-65commentary
  • John Barton, Joel and Obadiah, OTL (Louisville: WJK, 2001), 88-94commentary
  • Elie Assis, The Book of Joel: A Prophet between Calamity and Hope, LHBOTS 581 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 176-184monograph
  • John Strazicich, Joel's Use of Scripture and the Scripture's Use of Joel, Biblical Interpretation Series 82 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 187-196monograph
  • Michael A. Rydelnik, "The Teacher of Righteousness: A Messianic Interpretation of Joel 2:23," Bibliotheca Sacra 176 (2019): 164-178journal-article
  • Carol L. Meyers and Eric M. Meyers, Zechariah 9-14, AB 25C (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 175-185commentary
  • David L. Petersen, Zechariah 9-14 and Malachi, OTL (Louisville: WJK, 1995), 68-71commentary
  • Mark J. Boda, The Book of Zechariah, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 599-606commentary
  • Marvin H. Pope, Job, AB 15, 3rd ed. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1973), 213-215commentary
  • Edouard Dhorme, A Commentary on the Book of Job, trans. H. Knight (London: Nelson, 1967), 428-430commentary
  • Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985), 402-412commentary
  • David J. A. Clines, Job 21-37, WBC 18A (Nashville: Nelson, 2006), 970, 995-997commentary
  • Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10-31, AB 18B (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 615-616commentary
  • Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs, Chapters 15-31, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 21-24commentary
  • Richard J. Clifford, Proverbs, OTL (Louisville: WJK, 1999), 157-159commentary
  • Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (New York: Judaica Press, 1903), 719b-720adictionary
  • J. Payne Smith, A Compendious Syriac Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1903), 279adictionary
  • Richard M. Riss, Latter Rain: The Latter Rain Movement of 1948 and the Mid-Twentieth Century Evangelical Awakening (Mississauga: Honeycomb Visual Productions, 1987)monograph
  • D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: The Significance of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought, JPTSup 10 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996)monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of מַלְקוֹשׁ

m s absolute

מַלְקוֹשׁ

Deu 11:14, Job 29:23, Pro 16:15, Jer 3:3, Jer 5:24, Hos 6:3, Jol 2:23, Zec 10:1