to heap earth and stone up high: to build a raised road or ramp, or to pile something into a mound
Ancient roads were not paved. A serious road was made by heaping earth and stone into a long bank that stood above the mud and the rough ground on either side, and then clearing the loose stones off the top of it. That heaping is what this verb names. The finished product has its own Hebrew name, the raised highway (מְסִלָּה), built from the same root as the verb that makes it.
Because the work is simply piling material up high, the verb goes wherever heaped earth goes:
- the prophets use it for the road thrown up ahead of God and his returning people, with the command doubled for urgency and paired with an order to turn the obstacles out of the way
- soldiers use it for the earth ramp raised against a city under siege, an image Job turns on himself when he pictures God's troops running their attack road up to one man's tent
- Jeremiah uses it for a conquered city heaped into piles like mounds of harvested grain
The word also describes a road that has actually been made, as opposed to a track merely worn by feet. Proverbs says the honest walk on such a built road while the lazy man's way is a hedge of thorns, and Jeremiah accuses his people of abandoning the old roads for a way that was never built at all.
Nuances
Whether the opening command of this line tells the hearer to build a road for God or to lift up praise to him.
- contestedThe verb keeps its ordinary sense of heaping up a raised roadway, so the line calls for a highway to be thrown up for the God who rides through the desert wastes, in the same manner as the road-building commands of Isaiah 57:14 and 62:10.; BDB, s.v. סלל; HALOT, s.v. סלל
- contestedThe verb is used in the wider sense of lifting up, with praise or a song as the implied object, so the line calls for the God who rides the clouds to be extolled, parallel to the two commands to sing that precede it.; Mitchell Dahood, Psalms II: 51–100 (Anchor Bible 17)