a threshold: the raised stone sill at the bottom of an entrance, the step you cross going in.
This word names a piece of masonry, not an idea. It is the strip of stone laid across the bottom of an entrance, the part underfoot as a person passes from outside to inside. It sits alongside the other pieces of a doorway rather than standing in for them: the opening itself is a different word (פֶּתַח), the uprights on either side are another (מְזוּזָה), and the swinging panel is another again (דֶּלֶת). Ezekiel's guided tour of the temple names several of these in the same breath, which is how we can see they are distinct parts.
All eight uses are literal, and all but one belong to a temple or a great house. That setting is what makes the word memorable, because in these texts the threshold is where things stop, turn, or begin:
- Dagon's broken head and hands come to rest on the threshold of his own temple, after which his priests refuse to tread on it (1 Samuel 5:4 and 5:5)
- the glory of God moves to the threshold of the house and pauses there before leaving (Ezekiel 9:3; 10:4; 10:18)
- the prince stands at the gate and bows down at its threshold, going no further in (Ezekiel 46:2)
- water flows out from under the threshold of the house and becomes a river (Ezekiel 47:1)
The line between inside and outside is doing real work in every one of those scenes. The word itself stays plain, but it keeps landing at the moment a boundary matters. The more common Hebrew word for a doorway sill (סַף) covers much of the same ground and also stretches to the officials called the keepers of the threshold and to a basin for liquid; this word never travels that far, staying with the stone at the door.
Nuances
What the phrase about leaping over the threshold in Zephaniah 1:9 describes.
- contestedA foreign or superstitious custom of avoiding contact with the threshold, of the kind reported of Dagon's priests in 1 Samuel 5:5, and paired in context with the foreign clothing condemned in the previous verse.; BDB, s.v. מִפְתָּן; Adele Berlin, Zephaniah (Anchor Bible 25A, 1994)
- contestedServants or royal officials rushing over thresholds to seize plunder, matching the second half of the verse about filling their master's house with violence and deceit.; Marvin A. Sweeney, Zephaniah (Hermeneia, 2003); O. Palmer Robertson, The Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah (NICOT, 1990)