ritspah

This word names a floor made of stone, not of beaten earth: pieces cut and fitted together into one hard, finished surface. Hebrew has a verb for exactly that kind of fitting work (רָצַף), used once of the inlaid interior of a royal carrying chair, and this noun names the surface such work produces. Where the Bible describes the stones, they are costly and colored, so what is in view is closer to a mosaic than to a plain slab.

Every place it appears is a building worth describing in detail. In Ezekiel's guided tour of the temple it is a fixed feature of the plan: the paved area runs all the way around the outer court, thirty rooms face onto it, and it is called the lower paving because the outer court sits below the holier inner one. In Chronicles it is simply the temple floor, and it matters because that is the surface the whole assembly drops onto when fire falls and the glory fills the house. In Esther it is the floor of a Persian drinking party, laid with expensive stone.

So the word quietly carries a contrast the writers seem to feel. The same craftsmanship that marks out holy ground in a temple is spent, in Esther, on a courtyard built for showing off. A second Hebrew word for a paved surface (מַרְצֶפֶת) turns up once, when a king takes the temple's great bronze basin off its oxen and sets it down on stone paving.

In Isaiah's vision, one of the winged attendants at God's throne takes something off the altar with tongs and carries it to the prophet's mouth. The word for what he carries means a piece of stone or a live ember glowing with heat, hot enough that it has to be lifted with a tool rather than a hand.

Older reference works filed this together with the word for a stone floor, since the two are spelled identically in Hebrew. Most now keep them apart, because comparison with neighboring languages turns up two different words that happen to have collapsed into one Hebrew spelling: one means to fit stones together, the other belongs with a word for stones heated in a fire. Nothing links paved floors and burning coals except the accident of spelling.

A closely related Hebrew word (רֶצֶף) names the heated stones an exhausted Elijah finds a cake baked on, so the everyday picture behind the word is a hearth: stones out of the fire, still holding its heat. In Isaiah that ordinary object does something drastic. Fire off the altar touches unclean lips, and the guilt is gone.