to settle down in a place and stay there: to pitch one's dwelling and make it home
At its heart this word means to come to rest somewhere and stay. The picture behind it is a camp pitched rather than a throne occupied, which is why Hebrew keeps it distinct from the commoner verb for living somewhere (יָשַׁב), a word that also means to sit and to be enthroned, and from the verb for living somewhere as an outsider without full belonging (גּוּר). Many scholars hear a real note of tent life in it. That note is a tendency and not a rule, because the same word describes God dwelling on Zion forever, so nothing in it requires that the stay be brief.
It ranges over almost everything that can come to rest somewhere:
- a family, a tribe, or a whole nation taking up a land
- birds nesting in the branches of a great tree
- wild creatures making dens in a ruined city
- the bright cloud of God's presence settling over the tent
- the dead lying down in the dust
Its most famous use is of God himself. When the LORD gives the plans for the sanctuary and says he will dwell among them, this is the word, and he settles among the people themselves rather than merely inside the building. The building takes its name from this verb: the tabernacle is simply the dwelling. Prophets after the exile press the promise harder, that God will dwell in the midst of his people forever. Later Jewish writers coined the term "Shekhinah" from this same root for God's settled presence, and readers of John's Gospel have long heard the idea again where the Word is said to have pitched his tent among us (σκηνόω).
Deuteronomy handles the word with unusual care. Instead of saying that God dwells at the temple, it speaks of the place he chooses to make his name dwell, and some scholars read that phrase in an older royal sense, of a king setting his name on a site to claim it as his own. The verb also works the other way round, of settling someone or something in a place: God plants Israel in the land, stations the guardians at the gate of Eden, and can be asked not to let wrongdoing settle in a person's tent.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether this verb inherently pictures tent life and provisional lodging, over against the commoner Hebrew verb for sitting or residing.
- majorityThe verb carries a genuine nuance of tenting or lodging, deliberately preferred in the tabernacle texts so that YHWH tents among Israel rather than being permanently housed, in contrast to yashav (to sit, to be enthroned, to reside).; Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus, JPS Torah Commentary (1991), at Exod 25:8; Frank Moore Cross, "The Priestly Tabernacle in the Light of Recent Research," in The Temple in Antiquity, ed. Truman G. Madsen (1984), 91-105; Menahem Haran, Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel (1978)
- minorityThe contrast is overdrawn: the two roots overlap heavily in actual usage, the lexica gloss both as settling, dwelling, and abiding, and shakan itself denotes thoroughly permanent dwelling (YHWH dwelling in Zion forever), so temporariness is not intrinsic to the word.; HALOT, s.v. שׁכן; BDB, s.v. שׁכן
What the verb means in the Deuteronomic formula for the place YHWH chooses for his name (Deut 12:11; 14:23; 16:2, 6, 11; 26:2; Jer 7:12).
- majorityThe verb keeps its normal sense of causing to dwell: Deuteronomy speaks of YHWH making his name dwell at the chosen place, and this wording underwrites the long-recognized shem theology. Even scholars who grant that "to place his name" is a defensible rendering hold that these texts still assert divine presence, with its nature and extent deliberately left open.; Gerhard von Rad, Studies in Deuteronomy (1953); Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Dethronement of Sabaoth: Studies in the Shem and Kabod Theologies (1982); Michael B. Hundley, "To Be or Not to Be: A Reexamination of Name Language in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History," VT 59 (2009): 533-555; Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (2009)
- minorityThe Hebrew phrase is a loan-adaptation of the Akkadian monumental idiom shuma shakanu, in which a king installs his inscribed name to claim a monument or a territory; the verb therefore means to place, not to cause to dwell, and no distinct name theology of the classic kind follows from it.; Sandra L. Richter, The Deuteronomistic History and the Name Theology: leshakken shemo sham in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, BZAW 318 (2002); Sandra L. Richter, "The Place of the Name in Deuteronomy," VT 57 (2007): 342-366