sweet: tasting like honey, and so anything that is a pleasure to take in
Sweetness in the Hebrew Bible starts on the tongue, and its home is honey. Samson's riddle turns on it. A father tells his son to eat honey because the comb is sweet on the palate. The woman in the Song of Songs says her lover is like an apple tree among the trees of the wood, and that his fruit was sweet to her taste. Wherever food is in view, the word means exactly what we mean by it: the pleasure of something delicious.
From there it stretches, the same way our own word does. The text calls all kinds of things sweet:
- kind words are sweet to the appetite and healing to the bones
- the sleep of a working man is sweet, whether he has eaten little or much
- daylight itself is sweet, and it is good for the eyes to see the sun
- the LORD's rulings are sweeter than honey and the drippings of the comb
In every one of these the taste picture is still doing the work. The writer is not saying the thing is merely nice. He is saying that taking it in is a pleasure, the way honey is.
The word can also stand alone as the thing itself, "something sweet" or "sweetness," with no noun attached. Samson asks how out of the strong came something sweet. Ezekiel eats the scroll and it turns to honey for sweetness in his mouth. And Isaiah cries out against people who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter, where two taste words have become shorthand for a whole moral world turned upside down.
Nearby words come at the same ground from different angles. The word for pleasant or lovely, נָעִים, describes what delights without the taste picture behind it, and the broad word for good, טוֹב, often stands right beside sweetness in the same line, weighing worth rather than flavor. In the Greek New Testament the word for sweet, γλυκύς, does the same job, most memorably when John eats a little scroll that is sweet as honey in his mouth and turns his stomach sour.