a costly precious stone, workable enough to be engraved like a seal, whose exact mineral is no longer known
All eleven times this word appears, it names a costly stone. It is one of the treasures of the land of Havilah in Genesis, one of the materials Israel donates for the sanctuary, one of the twelve stones set in the high priest's breastpiece, the material of the two large engraved stones worn on his shoulders, part of what David stockpiles for the temple, and one of the stones covering the king of Tyre in Ezekiel. In Job 28:16 it stands beside sapphire (סַפִּיר) and the gold of Ophir as one of the most expensive things anyone could name.
Two facts about the stone are firm, and they are almost the only clues to what it was. It was rare and expensive. And it could be cut and engraved: the two stones on the priest's shoulders each carried six tribal names cut into them like a seal, so the stone had to come in pieces that large and had to take fine engraving. Everything else is missing. The Hebrew never gives its color, never describes it, and the word behind the name turns up nowhere else in the language, so there is nothing left to reason from.
The ancient translators were already guessing. The Greek Old Testament renders this one Hebrew word at least six different ways: a leek-green stone in Genesis, "emerald" (σμάραγδος) where the shoulder stones are made, "beryl" (βήρυλλος) in the breastpiece list, "sard" among the donated materials, "onyx" in Job, and in 1 Chronicles 29:2 simply the Hebrew word spelled out in Greek letters. Josephus, a priest who had actually seen the temple garments, called the shoulder stones sardonyx (σαρδόνυξ) and then contradicted himself about the order of the breastpiece stones across his two accounts. The standard Hebrew dictionaries still disagree with each other: one calls the identification doubtful and lists onyx, chrysoprase, beryl, and malachite; another proposes red carnelian; another keeps onyx.
Recent work leaves two serious options, and neither has won:
- a pale or green stone of a kind actually cut for seals and amulets in the region, such as green feldspar or a green form of chalcedony, which fits the old guess that the name once meant something pale and the Greek renderings that reach for green
- the traditional onyx or sardonyx, a banded stone, which fits the Latin translation that gave English its "onyx" and the one eyewitness description of the shoulder stones
The strongest argument against onyx is that polished onyx as a worked gem belongs mostly to the later Greek and Roman world. The strongest argument against reading the stone as red is that the red slot in the priest's list already belongs to a different word, the one usually rendered "sardius" (אֹדֶם).
Disputed
Which stone this word actually names.
- majorityThe stone cannot be identified from the surviving evidence. All that can be established is that it was a costly stone obtainable in pieces large enough to be engraved like a seal, and any confident single-word gloss overstates what is known.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), s.v. shoham; John I. Durham, Exodus (Word Biblical Commentary 3; Word, 1987); Cornelis Houtman, Exodus (Historical Commentary on the Old Testament; Peeters)
- contestedA pale or green stone of a kind demonstrably worked for seals and amulets in the pre-Hellenistic Levant and Egypt, most plausibly green feldspar (amazonite) or a green chalcedony or jasper.; James A. Harrell, James K. Hoffmeier, and Kenton F. Williams, "Hebrew Gemstones in the Old Testament," Bulletin for Biblical Research 27.1 (2017): 1-52; James A. Harrell, "Old Testament Gemstones," Bulletin for Biblical Research 21 (2011)
- contestedOnyx or sardonyx, a banded chalcedony, following the Vulgate tradition, Josephus's account of the shoulder stones, and comparative Arabic and Egyptian evidence for banded chalcedony.; Ephraim S. Ayil, Identifying the Stones of Classical Hebrew: A Modern Philological Approach (Brill, 2024), ch. 13; David J. A. Clines, ed., Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield Phoenix), s.v. shoham
- minorityRed carnelian, on the strength of the proposed Akkadian connection.; HALOT (Brill, 1994-2000), s.v. shoham
- minorityBeryl, later specified as aquamarine, following the Greek and Targumic renderings and the reconstructed sense "pale" for the underlying root.; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament, s.v. shoham