sarah

This is a noun built from the verb meaning to turn aside, leave, or be taken away (סוּר). It does not picture an uprising or a coup. It pictures people walking off the road they were given, away from the God they belong to, and it became the prophets' standard name for that walking away.

Almost every time the word appears, someone is talking. Deuteronomy makes a prophet who has "spoken" it liable to death. Jeremiah uses the same wording twice in sentences passed on prophets who told Judah what it wanted to hear. Isaiah lists it among the things a guilty people say out loud. So the word names both the desertion and the persuasion that produces it, which is why English versions have to shift between "rebellion", "revolt", and "turning away" from verse to verse.

Isaiah shows how far the idea stretches. In one place a beaten people simply keep adding to it, so that more punishment would change nothing. In another they have gone deep into it, so that coming back means climbing out of a hole they dug. The word describes a direction of travel more than a single act, which is why it can be piled up, deepened, and preached.

One occurrence is legal rather than religious. In the Deuteronomy law about witnesses, a hostile witness stands up and testifies this word against a man. Two readings are live, and the choice changes the English:

• the word names the crime the witness alleges, so the man is being accused of a serious offense
• the word names the falseness of the testimony itself, so the witness is testifying wrongly against him

The law's own wording leans toward the second. A few lines later the same man is called a lying witness who has testified a lie (שֶׁקֶר), and the penalty falls on him rather than on the accused.

Either way the underlying picture holds. A swerve away from what is right is what this word carries everywhere else, and here it has simply moved out of the sanctuary and into the courtroom.

One line in Isaiah uses the word with no moral weight at all. A tyrant is described as striking the nations with a blow that had none of this, which readers take to mean a blow that never let up.

The idea comes straight from the verb behind the noun (סוּר): what turns aside, goes away, stops. Here it is the stopping that never came, so the noun names a pause the victims were never given.

Because this is the only place the word works this way, some treat it as a separate word that happens to be spelled the same. Either way the line is not about deserting God. It is about relentlessness.