a nest: the sheltered spot a bird builds to lay its eggs and raise its young, and by extension a snug dwelling a person, clan, or nation makes its own
Nearly every time this word appears it means a real nest: a bird's nest with eggs or chicks in it, high on a cliff face or in a tree beside the road. Hebrew does not separate the built cup of twigs from the place a bird settles; one word covers both. It turns up in a law protecting a mother bird, in God's tour of the wild creatures, and in the picture of an eagle stirring up its young to fly.
From that plain picture the word stretches to cover human dwellings, and it keeps the same two notes: shelter and height. It can name
- the compartments built inside Noah's ark, nesting cells for its living cargo
- the household where a man expects to end his days at peace
- a clan's stronghold tucked into a cliff out of an enemy's reach
- an empire's perch, boasted to be set as high as the stars
What holds that range together is not the twigs but the safety: a nest is the place its occupant counts on.
The prophets seize on exactly that. Balaam tells a cliff-dwelling clan that their nest is set in the rock, and then announces their ruin. Jeremiah and Obadiah say Edom's nest is as high as an eagle's, set among the stars, and that God will bring it down from there. Habakkuk pronounces woe on the ruler who sets his nest on high to keep himself out of harm's way. Assyrian kings had bragged of scooping up enemy cities like a bird's nest, and Isaiah puts that very boast back in an Assyrian king's mouth. So the word ends up carrying a paradox: a nest is where things are safe, until they are not.
In Psalm 84:3 it stands beside the ordinary Hebrew word for a house (בַּיִת): the sparrow has found a house and the swallow a nest at God's altars, while the worshiper who envies them is still far from the courts he longs for. Hebrew also has a matching verb, to make a nest (קִנֵּן), which the prophets use of birds moving into ruined cities and of kings settled comfortably in their cedar palaces.
Nuances
What Job 29:18 claims, and whether the noun here is the word for nest at all. The verse reads, literally, I said, with my nest I shall expire, and I shall multiply days like the chol. Two questions are entangled. First, chol normally means sand, giving the idiom of days as numberless as sand; rabbinic tradition (b. Sanhedrin 108b; Genesis Rabbah 19:5) instead understood it as the phoenix, the bird that dies in its nest and is reborn, which would make the parallel nest and phoenix and pull the verse back toward literal ornithology. Second, an independent minority line denies that qen here means nest, positing a homonymous noun for strength or vigor.
- majorityQen means nest, used of Job's household, and chol means sand: I shall die at home, and my days will be numberless as the sand. The standard reading in critical scholarship, since chol means sand everywhere else in Hebrew and the days like sand formula is idiomatic for long life.; Marvin H. Pope, Job, Anchor Bible 15, 3rd ed. (Doubleday, 1973); David J. A. Clines, Job 21-37, Word Biblical Commentary 18A (Nelson, 2006); John E. Hartley, The Book of Job, NICOT (Eerdmans, 1988); Edouard Dhorme, A Commentary on the Book of Job, ET (Nelson, 1967); Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books (Norton, 2010)
- minorityChol is the phoenix, so the verse pairs nest with the immortal bird: I shall die in my nest and multiply days like the phoenix. Revived on the basis of a proposed Ugaritic cognate and of the tight parallelism the reading produces, and printed by NRSV, JPS 1917, and NAB.; Mitchell Dahood, Nest and Phoenix in Job 29,18, Biblica 48 (1967): 542-544; Mitchell Dahood, Hol Phoenix in Job 29:18 and in Ugaritic, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 36 (1974): 85-88; Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job, Old Testament Library (Westminster, 1985); Robert Gordis, The Book of Job (Jewish Theological Seminary, 1978)
- majorityThere is no biblical phoenix: the Greek translators' phoinix meant palm tree, and the rabbinic phoenix is a late Hellenistic import rather than a survival of the original sense.; Francoise Lecocq, Y a-t-il un phenix dans la Bible?, Kentron 30 (2014): 55-82; Roelof Van den Broek, The Myth of the Phoenix (Brill, 1972), 58-60; Maren Niehoff, The Phoenix in Rabbinic Literature, Harvard Theological Review 89 (1996): 245-265
- minorityThe noun in this verse is not the word for nest but a homonym meaning strength or vigor, so Job says he expected to die in his full strength; on this view not every occurrence of the word is a live nest metaphor.; G. R. Driver, Birds in the Old Testament, II, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 87 (1955): 129-140; James Barr, Is Hebrew qen "nest" a Metaphor?, in Semitic Studies in Honor of Wolf Leslau (Harrassowitz, 1991), 1:150-161
Whether Genesis 6:14 reads qinnim, nests or compartments, as the Masoretic Text vocalizes it, or should be revocalized as qanim, reeds. On the emendation the clause joins gopher wood and pitch in a list of building materials, with parallels in the Mesopotamian flood accounts; on the received text the ark's interior is divided into nesting cells for its living cargo, which is how the Septuagint (nossias) and the other ancient versions took it. An older, now largely abandoned proposal read a copyist's duplication, qinnim qinnim, compartment upon compartment.
- majorityKeep the Masoretic Text: the plural means nests, that is, the ark's internal compartments, a live metaphor supported by the Septuagint's nossias and by the ancient versions generally.; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11, Continental Commentary (Fortress, 1994), 421; Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary 1 (Word, 1987), 172-173; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (JPS, 1989); Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis 1-17, NICOT (Eerdmans, 1990), 281-282; Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26, New American Commentary (B&H, 1996)
- minorityRevocalize to qanim, reeds, giving a materials list (wood, reeds, pitch) that matches the Mesopotamian flood traditions.; Edward Ullendorff, The Construction of Noah's Ark, Vetus Testamentum 4 (1954): 95-96; John Day, The Flood and the Ten Antediluvian Figures, in From Creation to Babel (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), 113-122
- minorityRead a copyist's duplication, qinnim qinnim, compartment upon compartment; proposed in older criticism and now with few followers.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, 890, citing Lagarde, Dillmann, Holzinger, and Gunkel; John Skinner, Genesis, International Critical Commentary (T&T Clark, 1910)
Disputed
Whether Hebrew qen carries the extended sense household or family line that its cognates carry. Akkadian qinnu (CAD Q 257-260) and Aramaic and Syriac qinna are lexicalized for family or clan alongside nest. The Hebrew lexicons record only nest and the extension to the ark's cells, but several treatments hear the household sense at Job 29:18 (I shall die in my nest) and Habakkuk 2:9 (to set his nest on high), where the noun verges on house or dynasty.
- majorityHebrew does not lexicalize a household sense: the standard lexicons list nest and, by extension, the ark's compartments, and treat any household resonance as an effect of the poetry rather than a distinct sense.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, 890, s.v. קֵן; Koehler, Baumgartner, Stamm, HALOT, s.v. קֵן; David J. A. Clines, ed., Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 7 (Sheffield Phoenix, 2010)
- minorityThe household or dynasty extension attested for the cognates is felt in Hebrew too, and is the better reading of Job 29:18 and Habakkuk 2:9, even if the lexicons decline to formalize it.; Willem A. VanGemeren, ed., New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, vol. 3 (Zondervan, 1997); CAD Q (Chicago, 2010), 257-260; Wilfred G. E. Watson, Yet Another Hittite Loanword in Ugaritic?, Historiae 12 (2015): 25-31