the eyelids: the pair of lids that open, close, and frame a person's eyes, and by extension the eyes themselves and the look they give
This is the Hebrew word for eyelids, and it always comes as a pair belonging to someone: my eyelids, your eyelids, hers. Hebrew poetry likes to set it beside the ordinary word for the eye (עַיִן), one line naming the eyes and the next the lids that frame them, so the two work as a matched pair rather than as alternatives.
Because the lids are the part that actually moves, the word often carries the look itself rather than the organ behind it:
- lids that lift describe a proud, scornful stare
- lids held steady describe a fixed and undistracted gaze
- a woman's lids can capture the man who watches them
- God's lids testing people picture eyes narrowing to look hard
Two uses stay firmly physical. Sleep is refused by giving the eyes no sleep and the eyelids no slumber, since the lids are what fall shut. Grief runs down them too: tears gush from the eyelids, and in one line of Job a deep darkness settles on them.
The most memorable use is a set poetic phrase, "the eyelids of the dawn". Daybreak is pictured as an eye slowly opening, so the phrase names the first flicker of light at the horizon. Job reaches for it twice, once wishing that the day of his birth had never seen dawn break, and once describing the fiery eyes of the sea monster Leviathan.