StrongerBible

pelaḥ

פֶּלַח

HebrewH6400“millstone, slice, ...”

Appears 6 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Jdg 9:531Sa 30:122Sa 11:21Job 41:24(16)Sng 4:3Sng 6:7
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradePEH-lakhnoun

What pelaḥ means

a piece cut or split off something larger: a slab, a slice, a chunk.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This word names the result of an action rather than a thing in its own right: whatever has been split or cut off a larger whole. It comes from a verb meaning to split or cleave open (פָּלַח), and it holds on to that idea everywhere it appears. English Bibles have to name the object instead of the action, so the same Hebrew word surfaces as "millstone" in one verse and "slice" in another.

The six places it appears show how far that single idea stretches:

  • the upper stone of a hand mill, thrown from a tower onto Abimelech's head in Judges 9:53 and recalled as a warning in 2 Samuel 11:21
  • the lower stone of that same mill, the hardest slab of the set, used in Job 41:24 to picture a heart that will not give way
  • a slice of pomegranate, matching the color of the woman's face behind her veil in Song of Songs 4:3 and 6:7
  • a piece broken from a pressed cake of figs, fed to a starving man in 1 Samuel 30:12

The mill as a whole has its own word (רֵחֶה); this one picks out a single cut stone of it. Those stones are not the large turning wheels most readers picture. Households in this period ground grain by pushing a smaller stone back and forth across a larger, dished lower slab, and the upper stone was light enough to hold in both hands. That is why a woman on a rooftop could throw one hard enough to kill.

In Biblical Aramaic a verb built on the same three letters (פְּלַח) moved a long way from cutting and came to mean serving or worshiping a god, the word used when Daniel's friends refuse to serve the king's gods. Hebrew never took that road. Here the word stays concrete: a stone, a slice, a chunk of food.

Nuances

1aa cut slab of stone from a hand mill: either the upper stone that rides on top or the harder lower stone beneath it.
Jdg 9:532Sa 11:21Job 41:24(16)
1ba piece cut from something to eat: a slice of fruit, or a chunk broken from a pressed cake.
TranslatabilityDirect
1Sa 30:12Sng 4:3Sng 6:7
Sng 4:3

What the comparison to a piece of pomegranate in Song of Songs 4:3 (and its repetition in 6:7) is meant to picture: the red surface of the fruit seen through the veil, or the cut interior with its seeds exposed.

  • majorityThe point is color, with a hint of roundness: the fresh red of the fruit answering to a healthy cheek or brow half hidden behind a veil. The ancient Greek translation, which chose a word for the fruit's rind, points the same way.; Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs, Anchor Bible (1977); Othmar Keel, The Song of Songs, Continental Commentary (1994); Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs, NICOT (2001); Duane Garrett, Song of Songs, WBC (2004); J. Cheryl Exum, Song of Songs, OTL (2005)
  • minorityThe point is the opened interior of the fruit: the white grains shot through with red juice, which older commentators judged the more beautiful sight.; John Gill, An Exposition of the Old Testament, on Song of Songs 4:3; Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible, on Song of Songs 4:3

What scholars say about pelaḥ

The lexicons trace the noun to the root פלח "to cleave, split," and treat the six occurrences as one concrete term for something split or cut off, with context supplying the object. BDB heads the entry "cleavage, mill-stone," listing פֶּלַח רֶכֶב (Judges 9:53; 2 Samuel 11:21) as the upper or "riding" stone and פֶּלַח תַּחְתִּית (Job 41:16 Hebrew, 41:24 English) as the nether stone, and files פֶּלַח דְּבֵלָה (1 Samuel 30:12) as a piece of a fig cake; Gesenius derives the millstone sense from "the even and cut away part" and compares Arabic falaha "to split, plow"; HALOT and DCH foreground the unifying gloss "slice, piece" with the millstone as a specialized application. The disagreement is one of arrangement and emphasis, not of meaning, and no lexicon posits a second root. The ancient versions diverge instructively: the Septuagint renders the millstone κλάσμα μύλου, the pomegranate λέπυρον ("rind"), and paraphrases Job 41 with ἄκμων ἀνήλατος ("unforgeable anvil"), where the Vulgate independently converges on incus. Archaeology of Iron Age grinding stones (Avshalom-Gorni, Frankel, and Getzov on grooved upper stones of saddle querns; Eitam on the transition to rotary querns only in the Hellenistic period; Borowski on household grinding) establishes that the פֶּלַח רֶכֶב of Judges 9:53 was the hand held upper stone of a saddle quern, which dissolves the older difficulty over how a woman could throw a rotary runner stone. On Song of Songs 4:3 and 6:7 the modern center of gravity favors color, the red glow of cheek or brow through the veil (Pope, Fox, Keel, Longman, Garrett, Exum), over the older exposed seed reading (Gill, Clarke); Möller notes that both רַקָּה and פֶּלַח are singular, so the common English plural "halves" over-translates. The Aramaic verb פְּלַח "to serve, worship" (Daniel 3:12, 14, 17, 18, 28; 6:16, 20; 7:14, 27; Ezra 7:24) is the one dramatic development in the root's history, and it is an Aramaic phenomenon: the mainstream reconstruction runs within p-l-ḥ (split, plow, till, serve, render cultic service), parallel to עבד, while BDB's comparison with Akkadian palāḫu "to fear, revere" raises the separate possibility that the cultic coloring was reinforced by contact in Aramaic's Mesopotamian setting. Kaufman's criteria for admitting Akkadian loans counsel restraint here, and palāḫu should not be asserted as the etymon of the Hebrew noun.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. פֶּלַח and (Aramaic) פְּלַחlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. פֶּלַחlexicon
  • DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. פֶּלַחlexicon
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebräisches und aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, s.v. פֶּלַחlexicon
  • Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, s.v. פלחlexicon
  • Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs, Anchor Bible (1977)commentary
  • Othmar Keel, The Song of Songs, Continental Commentary (1994)commentary
  • Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs, NICOT (2001)commentary
  • Duane Garrett, Song of Songs, WBC (2004)commentary
  • J. Cheryl Exum, Song of Songs, OTL (2005)commentary
  • Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (1985)monograph
  • D. Avshalom-Gorni, R. Frankel, and N. Getzov, "Grooved Upper Grinding Stones of Saddle Querns in Israel," Tel Aviv 31.2 (2004): 262-267article
  • David Eitam, "Iron Age Grinding Stones in Israel," and his chapter in N. Alonso, T. Anderson, and L. Jaccottey, eds., Querns and Mills in Mediterranean Antiquity (2023)article
  • Oded Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel (1987)monograph
  • Stephen A. Kaufman, The Akkadian Influences on Aramaic, Assyriological Studies 19 (University of Chicago, 1974)monograph
  • Franz Rosenthal, A Grammar of Biblical Aramaic, Porta Linguarum Orientaliummonograph
  • Takamitsu Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Aramaic (2011)monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of פֶּלַח

f s construct

פֶּלַח

Jdg 9:53, 1Sa 30:12, 2Sa 11:21, Sng 4:3, Sng 6:7

f s absolute

פֶלַח

Job 41:24