tseltselim

This is one of the two Hebrew words for cymbals, and the plainer of the two. It appears in the crowd of instruments David and all Israel play before the LORD as the ark is brought up, and again at the close of the Psalms, where the last instruments called to praise God are cymbals named twice over: once for their clear ring, once for their crash.

The name is itself a piece of the sound. It doubles a syllable the way the instrument repeats its own clash, much as English does with "ding-dong" or "clang." That is also why the same word covers the whir of wings elsewhere: Hebrew will often name a thing by the noise it makes rather than by what it is made of or what it looks like.

The Chronicler's account of the same procession uses the other word for cymbals (מְצִלְתַּיִם), which is the standard term in the lists of temple musicians. Nothing in either text says the two are different instruments, so the difference looks like one of vocabulary and period rather than of hardware.

Two verses use the word for something that whirs. In Deuteronomy it is a creature: among the curses on a disobedient Israel, every tree and every crop is taken over by the whirrer, an insect identified by the noise of its wings rather than by its shape or its swarming. Which insect that is has never been settled. The candidates are a locust, a cricket, and a cicada, and the verse offers no detail beyond what the creature eats.

In Isaiah the word is the sound itself. The prophet calls out to a land beyond the rivers of Cush as the "land of whirring wings," and readers have heard three different things in that phrase:

• the beating of insect wings over the marshes of the upper Nile
• the creak and slap of oars and sails on the light river boats the passage goes on to describe
• shade thrown by outspread wings, an older reading that took the word as a relative of the word for shadow

The standard lexicons now settle on the noise, which is what the word means in Deuteronomy as well. But the older "shadowing with wings" survives in some English Bibles, which is why that one verse can look entirely different from one translation to the next.

Once the word is a weapon. In the challenge to Job about Leviathan, God asks whether Job can fill the creature's hide with barbs and its head with fish spears. The tool in view is a hand weapon for taking something large out of the water, barbed so the catch cannot slip free.

Nothing in the verse describes the implement, so English versions have to pick a name for it, and they land on "harpoons," "fish spears," or simply "spears." The choice does not change the question being asked: the ordinary gear of a fisherman is useless against this creature.

Whether this is the same word as the one for whirring, perhaps named for the sound of the shaft in flight, or a separate word that merely looks the same, cannot be decided from a single occurrence.