StrongerBible

mirmas

מִרְמָס

HebrewH4823trampled down, trodden underfoot, ...

Appears 7 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Isa 5:5Isa 7:25Isa 10:6Isa 28:18Ezk 34:19Dan 8:13Mic 7:10
Root family
Word studymeer-MAHSnoun

What mirmas means

something trodden underfoot: ground, or people, reduced to what feet walk over.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This is a noun built from the verb "to trample" (רָמַס), and it names the result rather than the act. Hebrew does not say the vineyard is trampled; it says the vineyard "becomes a trampling," that is, becomes the sort of thing feet walk across. English versions almost always turn it back into a verb, which reads smoothly but loses the sense of a settled condition.

All seven uses sit inside prophetic warnings, and they turn on one idea: what used to be fenced, tended, or holy is now open ground. Isaiah's vineyard loses its wall and its hedge, and with them the only thing that kept feet out. The terraced hills of Isaiah 7:25, once worked with a hoe, become rough pasture that cattle and sheep wander over. In Ezekiel 34:19 the strong of the flock have walked through the grass and muddied the water, so what is left for the weaker sheep is ground that has already been stepped on. The verse just before it uses the matching verb, so the accusation and its result stand side by side.

When the thing walked over is people, the picture is public humiliation more than physical damage. Twice the prophets add the same comparison, "like the mud of the streets" (Isaiah 10:6; Micah 7:10): not merely crushed, but crushed where everyone passes and nobody looks down. Isaiah 28:18 turns the image on Judah's own leaders, whose bargain with death will not hold when the flood sweeps through.

Daniel 8:13 is the heaviest use, because there the thing walked on is the sanctuary itself, together with the people who serve in it. The question the watcher asks is how long this will go on, and that is exactly what the word is built to say: not one blow, but a state that lasts.

Nuances

1aground that gets walked over: a vineyard, hillside, or pasture left open to feet and hooves.
Isa 5:5Isa 7:25Ezk 34:19
1ba person, a people, or a holy place trodden underfoot by a conqueror.
Isa 10:6Isa 28:18Dan 8:13Mic 7:10

What scholars say about mirmas

מִרְמָס is a mem-preformative noun from רמס "to trample," attested seven times, all in prophetic material. BDB arranges it under a locative sense, a trampling place (Isaiah 5:5; 7:25), and a resultative one, a thing trampled (Isaiah 10:6; 28:18; Micah 7:10; Daniel 8:13), taking Ezekiel 34:19 מִרְמַס רַגְלֵיכֶם as "what your feet have trampled"; HALOT and DCH cover the same range with "trampled ground" and "what is trampled." The divergence between the lexica is one of arrangement rather than of sense, which is why the two senses given here are drawn along the line between trodden terrain and trodden persons. In Isaiah 5:5 and 7:25 the term belongs to the reversal of cultivated terrain to open pasture, a stock element of the covenant-curse repertoire, and Wildberger reads both within the vineyard song and the Syro-Ephraimite oracle as pictures of agricultural collapse. Daniel 8:13, where sanctuary and host are given over to מִרְמָס, is the syntactically most compressed occurrence and the seedbed of the later motif of the holy place trodden by the nations, taken up in Luke 21:24 and Revelation 11:2 through the Greek versions.

Sources

  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. מִרְמָסlexicon
  • BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. מִרְמָסlexicon
  • DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. מִרְמָסlexicon
  • Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 1-12: A Continental Commentary (1991)commentary
  • John E. Goldingay, Daniel, Word Biblical Commentary 30 (1989)commentary
  • Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2, Hermeneia (1983)commentary

All attested forms of מִרְמָס

m s absolute

מִרְמָס

Isa 5:5, Isa 10:6, Isa 28:18, Dan 8:13, Mic 7:10

m s construct

מִרְמַס

Isa 7:25, Ezk 34:19