to come to a complete end and be gone; and, with God acting, to finish something off entirely.
This is a rare and severe word. It turns up only a handful of times, always in poetry or prophecy, and always about something reaching a total end. It is not about slowing down or wearing out. It is about ceasing to exist.
Its two uses are the two sides of one event. Sometimes the word looks at whatever vanishes:
- the wicked in Psalm 73 are gone in a moment, as if they had never been,
- the memory of Purim, Esther promises, will never die out among the Jews,
- and the people of Isaiah 66 who eat what God has forbidden come to their end together.
Sometimes it looks instead at the one doing the sweeping, and there the speaker is always God: in Zephaniah and Jeremiah he announces that he will make a full end of everything he names.
Because it is so absolute, the word shows up where a writer wants to shut a door for good. In Psalm 73:19 it is doubled with a second verb of finality, "to be finished off" (תָּמַם), so the line reads like two hammer blows: they are swept off, they are done. The noun built on the same root, "an end" (סוֹף), simply names the point past which nothing continues.
One wrinkle runs through half its occurrences. In Zephaniah 1:2, 1:3 and Jeremiah 8:13 the word is spelled almost exactly like a form of a far commoner verb meaning "to gather in" (אָסַף), the word for bringing in a harvest, and in two of those verses that gathering word stands right beside it. Many readers think Zephaniah is trading on the resemblance on purpose: the line opens sounding like an ingathering and lands as an annihilation.
Nuances
Whether אָסֵף in Zephaniah 1:2 is a causative form of סוף "to make an end of" or a form of אסף "to gather."
- majorityA causative form of סוף, despite the anomalous aleph where a he would be expected: "I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth."; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. סוף; DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. סוף I
- minorityThe form should be repointed as אֹסֵף, from אסף "to gather," so that both verbs of the pair are the same root: "I will utterly gather everything from the face of the earth."; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. סוּף; Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, critical apparatus at Zephaniah 1:2
- contestedThe ambiguity is deliberate: the prophet exploits the near-identity of the two roots so that a line heard first as ingathering resolves into annihilation, and the reversal of the creation sequence in v. 3 confirms the destructive sense.; Adele Berlin, Zephaniah, Anchor Bible 25A (1994)