rimmah

This is not the earthworm of a garden. The word names the pale larvae that show up in meat left out too long, in an untreated wound, in a body laid in the ground. It is a collective word, so the single Hebrew form covers the whole squirming mass rather than one creature, which is why English versions print it as a plural, "maggots" or "worms".

The seven places it appears fall into a clear pattern:

• food that had spoiled overnight, in the story of the manna
• sores crawling on a living man, in Job's account of his own body
• the grave itself, where the dead lie down in the dust and are covered

Each picture works the same way. The maggot is the visible proof that decay has already set in, so the word carries a weight far beyond biology. Job tells the pit that it is his father and the worms that they are his mother and his sister, which is a way of saying that rot is now his only family. When Isaiah pictures the fallen king of Babylon going down to the place of the dead, maggots are his mattress and his blanket, a mocking opposite of a royal couch. And in one line the word becomes a name for humanity itself, a way of saying that people are as short-lived and as fragile as the creatures that will one day feed on them.

Twice the poets set this word beside the other Hebrew word for a worm (תּוֹלֵעָה), one in each half of the line. That is a matched poetic pair for the sake of the rhythm, not two different species being named.