a blazing flame: fire at full force, the strongest word Hebrew has for a flame
Hebrew already has serviceable words for fire and for flame, and this is not one of the everyday ones. It is rare, deliberately heightened, and it appears only three times in the Hebrew Bible, each time at the peak of a passage. It is built on the same root as the common poetic word for flame (לֶהָבָה), with an extra syllable added at the front, a way of forming words that Hebrew shares with Aramaic and otherwise almost never uses. The result is closer to "the thing that sets ablaze" than to plain "a flame".
Each of the three appearances puts that force to work differently:
- In Job it is a silent, drying heat that shrivels a wicked person the way a plant withers.
- In Ezekiel it is set right beside the ordinary word for flame (לֶהָבָה), so the phrase reads roughly "a flame of a flame", a wildfire of judgment that cannot be put out.
- In the Song of Songs it is stretched further still by an added ending, and it becomes the yardstick for love, the fiercest thing the poet can name.
The word never describes a small or steady flame, a lamp burning or a hearth kept going. It is always fire at its most consuming. Part of its weight comes from how it sounds: the way it is put together would have struck an ancient ear as slightly foreign and elevated, the way a borrowed word can still feel grand in English.
Whether the final syllable of the compound form at Song of Songs 8:6 is the shortened divine name Yah, giving "the flame of Yah", or a fossilised intensifying element, giving "a most vehement flame".
- contestedThe ending is the shortened divine name, so the colon reads "the very flame of Yah". Supporters point to the Ben Naphtali vocalisation and the medieval manuscripts that write the phrase as two words, to the medieval Jewish exegetical tradition, and to the combat-myth imagery of the surrounding lines (Death, Sheol, Many Waters), where fire is the divine warrior's weapon.; Aren M. Wilson-Wright, "Love Conquers All: Song of Songs 8:6b-7a as a Reflex of the Northwest Semitic Combat Myth," JBL 134 (2015): 333-345; Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 207; Roland E. Murphy, The Song of Songs, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990); Duane A. Garrett, Song of Songs, WBC 23B (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004)
- contestedThe ending is a fossilised superlative element, so the colon reads "a raging, most vehement flame". Supporters place it alongside other Hebrew expressions in which a divine element has drained of theological content and functions purely as an intensifier, and note that the Song is otherwise silent about God, and that no ancient version rendered the word as "flame of Yah".; D. Winton Thomas, "A Consideration of Some Unusual Ways of Expressing the Superlative in Hebrew," VT 3 (1953): 209-224; Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); J. Cheryl Exum, Song of Songs, OTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005); Richard S. Hess, Song of Songs, BCOTWP (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 239
- minorityA mediating position: the form is morphologically "flame of Yah" but functions as a superlative drawn from the stock of divine-name intensifiers, so the two readings converge in practice rather than excluding one another.; Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs, AB 7C (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 670-673