qadmoni

• It settles onto one particular landmark and hardens into its name. Ezekiel's temple has an east gate, the gate God's glory leaves by, and three prophets call the Dead Sea "the eastern sea", always set opposite the western sea so the two together mean the whole width of the land.Ezk 10:19Ezk 11:1Jol 2:20Zec 14:8
• It can name the people of an earlier age rather than the age itself: the ancients whose saying is still worth quoting in an argument, and the prophets of an earlier generation through whom God had already spoken.1Sa 24:13Ezk 38:17
• Its past stays inside remembered history: earlier years a worshipper could still picture, and things that happened in a hearer's own national story. It never reaches back before the world was made.Mal 3:4Isa 43:18

• Both words hold the same double range, the direction of the sunrise and the time long gone, and only the setting decides which is meant. One can mark the hill east of the city in the same book where the other marks the gate on the east side, and both can be turned to earlier days.Ezk 11:23Psa 44:1Ezk 11:1Mal 3:4
• Both are used in survey language to fix the eastern limit of the land, whether the border is being traced around the tribal inheritance or laid out again in a prophet's vision of a restored country.Num 34:11Jos 15:5Ezk 47:18
• Both point back to what God said or settled long ago in order to explain what he is doing now, so that a present event lands as the keeping of an old word rather than as a surprise.Isa 46:10Psa 119:152Ezk 38:17Isa 43:18

• It can name the east as a territory with people in it: the eastern lands themselves, the home country Abraham's relatives came from, and the desert peoples who ride in on Israel's harvest. Job is placed in that world by calling him the greatest of the people of the east.Gen 25:6Gen 29:1Jdg 6:3Job 1:3Isa 11:14
• It carries movement and facing, not just position. People travel east and settle there, blood is sprinkled toward the east, worshippers turn to face the sunrise. The word says which way someone goes or looks, and not only which side a thing sits on.Gen 11:2Gen 13:11Lev 16:14Ezk 8:16
• Its past reaches back behind all human memory, to the world's beginning and to God himself. Wisdom is said to be there before the earth was made, and God is called the God of the ancient past, which is why English Bibles often reach here for "everlasting".Pro 8:22Pro 8:23Deu 33:27Mic 5:2Hab 1:12
• The far past is something a speaker can take hold of and appeal to. Under pressure the psalmists call it to mind, think it over, and remind God of what he did then, and a mourner asks God to give those days back.Psa 77:5Psa 143:5Psa 74:2Lam 5:21

• Only this word also reaches back in TIME, meaning "earlier" or "long ago": Isaiah warns the people not to brood over "the things of old", Malachi looks forward to offerings pleasing to God as in "years gone by", Ezekiel points to what God said "in days long past", Saul quotes the saying "of the ancients", and Job speaks of the generation that lived before. The single surviving use of קַדְמוֹן never leaves the map.Isa 43:18Mal 3:4Ezk 38:171Sa 24:13Job 18:20
• It is the settled label for fixed features named by their eastern position: "the eastern sea" (the Dead Sea) and the temple's "east gate". It attaches to a specific landmark you could stand at, where קַדְמוֹן instead describes a whole stretch of country.Ezk 47:18Jol 2:20Zec 14:8Ezk 10:19Ezk 11:1
• It regularly stands paired against a matching word for the far side, which is what lets one word cover both space and time: the eastern sea against the western sea, and those who went before against those who come after.Jol 2:20Zec 14:8Job 18:20

• Both are adjectives meaning "eastern", marking what lies toward the sunrise: the direction water runs, the side a border is measured from, the sea at the far end of the land.Ezk 47:8Ezk 47:18Zec 14:8
• Ezekiel uses both inside one vision of the restored land, ten verses apart, with no difference of sense showing between them: the temple stream flows out to the eastern district, and the eastern boundary is measured down to the eastern sea.Ezk 47:8Ezk 47:18

—

• Names a compass direction. It marks the east side of a border, the gate on the east side of the temple, and the sea on the eastern edge of the land, which is a use the word for "first" never has.Ezk 47:18Ezk 11:1Jol 2:20Zec 14:8
• When it speaks of time it means a vague, remote "long ago" rather than a counted position, so nothing is being numbered: a saying handed down from the ancients, the far-off days when God spoke through the prophets, the years of a bygone age.1Sa 24:13Ezk 38:17Mal 3:4
• One word covers both a place and a time, so only the setting shows whether a passage means eastward or far back in the past, an ambiguity the word for "first" never creates.Ezk 10:19Mal 3:4

• Both point back to what has already happened, closely enough that Isaiah stacks them in one line: do not remember the earlier things, do not dwell on the things of long ago.Isa 43:18
• Both can label the days and the people of an earlier age, one calling them the days of long ago and the other calling them the earlier days and the earlier prophets.Ezk 38:17Mal 3:4Deu 4:32Ecc 7:10Zec 1:4
• Both work as one half of a pair, needing an opposite to complete the picture: the eastern sea against the western one, or those who went before against those who come after, and the earlier temple against the later one.Jol 2:20Job 18:20Hag 2:9Isa 44:6

• Counts position in a series: the first month of the year, the first day, the twin whose hand appeared first, the division that set out first on the march.Exo 12:2Gen 8:13Gen 38:28Num 10:14
• Ranks people by standing rather than by date: the officials who sat closest to the throne, the man who would become chief for striking the enemy first, one of the leading princes in Daniel's vision.Est 1:141Ch 11:6Dan 10:13
• Sets an earlier thing against the later one that replaces it, with both items in view at once: the first stone tablets against the replacements, the earlier temple against the one now being rebuilt.Exo 34:1Deu 10:1Ezr 3:12Hag 2:3
• Becomes a title God takes for himself in Isaiah, claiming to be there at the start of everything and still there at the end.Isa 41:4Isa 44:6Isa 48:12

• Labels a fixed side of a building: in Ezekiel it is the temple gate on the east, the gate the glory of God passes through when the city is abandoned.Ezk 10:19Ezk 11:1
• Its sense of time runs backward: years long gone that people appeal to, a better age of offerings, an old word God spoke through the prophets, a past Isaiah tells his hearers to stop staring at.Isa 43:18Ezk 38:17Mal 3:4
• Names the ancients as a source of quotable wisdom, so a speaker can settle an argument by citing what the old people used to say.1Sa 24:13

• Both take their bearings from a person facing the sunrise, so they work as a matched pair of opposite directions: the sea in front is the eastern one (the Dead Sea) and the sea behind is the western one (the Mediterranean), and naming both together means the whole land from edge to edge.Jol 2:20Zec 14:8
• Each can point either to a place or to a time, because what lies in front of a person is both the east and the days that came first, while what lies behind is both the west and what comes after. That double reach is why Job 18:20, where the two stand side by side, is read by some as a pair of directions (people in the west and people in the east) and by others as a pair of times (those who come later and those who lived before).Job 18:20

• Counts position in a series: the last of a set of signs, the last of two husbands, the last of the acts recorded about a king. The other word never numbers anything off in order.Exo 4:8Deu 24:32Ch 9:29
• Its sense of time runs forward: a day still to come, and the generations who will live after the present one and be told what God has done.Deu 29:22Psa 78:4Psa 102:18
• Describes where someone stands in a moving group: the children placed at the back of the company, the tribes that march in the rear, the troops bringing up the end of the column.Gen 33:2Num 2:311Sa 29:2
• Becomes a title for God in Isaiah, who calls himself the first and "the last", the one still there when everything else is gone. The other word is never used of God this way.Isa 41:4Isa 44:6Isa 48:12