ice: water frozen solid, the freezing cold that hardens it, and the clear gleam of a frozen surface
Hebrew has one word for water gone hard in the cold, and it covers more ground than the English word "ice" does. It names the frozen crust on a stream, the freezing night air that puts it there, and the clear glassy shine that frozen water gives off. Snow (שֶׁלֶג) falls and lies white, frost (כְּפוֹר) settles as a thin powder on open ground, and this word is the hard, locked, gleaming one.
In Genesis and Jeremiah it appears in a fixed pair with the scorching heat of the day. Jacob sums up his twenty years with Laban as heat by day and freezing cold by night, and Jeremiah uses the same two words over the body of a king left unburied. The pairing is a way of saying that a person is out in the open with nothing between him and the weather.
Everywhere else the word belongs to God's work in the weather, and the writers keep it just out of human reach:
- Job is asked out of the storm whose womb the ice ever came from
- Elihu says it is handed out by the breath of God
- Psalm 147 pictures God flinging it down like crumbs of bread, with a cold (קָרָה) nobody can stand before
That is also why Ezekiel can borrow the word for something that is not cold at all. The platform stretched above the living creatures gleams like ice, and the point is the dazzling, awe-inspiring clarity rather than the temperature.