salem

This is the word's most common use by far, and the courtroom is where it lives. When an ox gores a neighbor's animal, when a borrowed tool is broken, when a thief is caught, the wrong has left a hole in the community, and this verb names the act that fills it: pay back, in full, until the injured party is whole again. Israel's law shares this vocabulary with its neighbors, whose own legal records use the same word for compensation in almost identical cases.

From the courtroom the word spreads outward. God pays people back what their lives have earned, and the striking thing is that one verb carries both directions. Blessing to the faithful and disaster to the wicked are named with the same word, because in each case a person is simply handed the full measure of what they did. The verse, not the word, tells you whether the payback is a gift or a sentence.

Because the idea is settling an account rather than punishing, the word can turn generous. God promises to pay back Israel for the years the locusts ate, and to give comfort back to those who mourn, using the same verb that elsewhere threatens Babylon.

A vow in Israel is a debt freely taken on. Someone in trouble promises God an offering, a gift, or public thanks if rescue comes, and when it comes, this verb names the settling of that account. English Bibles usually say "fulfill" or "perform", but the Hebrew keeps the picture of money and debt: the worshiper pays.

The pattern runs all through the Psalms: trouble, then a vow, then rescue, then payment, usually made in public where others can see the promise kept. Scripture treats an unpaid vow as a serious failure. Better not to promise at all, Ecclesiastes warns, than to promise and leave the debt standing.

The language could also be abused. In Proverbs the seductress announces that she has just paid her vows, borrowing the vocabulary of settled devotion to make her invitation sound respectable.

Underneath every other use of this word lies a simple picture: a thing that is entire, with nothing missing and nothing broken. A building reaches that state when the last stone is laid, a task when the final piece is done, a stretch of mourning when its days have run out.

The same word turns outward to whoever does the finishing. God carries out what he has decided and brings a plan to its appointed end. In Hezekiah's bitter prayer the word is darker: God is finishing off a life the way a weaver cuts the cloth from the loom.

Scholars have argued for a century over whether this plain sense of wholeness is the heart of the word, with the repayment uses growing out of it, or whether the reverse is true. The answer most widely held today is that the two are faces of one idea. Paying for a broken jar and finishing a building are both acts of bringing something to its proper, complete state.

When the word looks at two parties rather than at an object or a debt, it means the trouble between them is over. Often the setting is war. A besieged city accepts terms, a beaten army submits, a king stops fighting his neighbor, and the text says they made peace with him. The peace usually runs downhill: the weaker side gives in and lives on the stronger side's terms.

The word also names quiet friendship. Job is promised that even the stones of the field will be at peace with him, and a psalm speaks of the one who was at peace with the singer, an ally who has since turned on him. The verb stands close to the familiar noun for peace (שָׁלוֹם), which is not a calm feeling but a whole and secure relationship.

Some lexicons treat this as a second verb, spelled the same but grown out of that noun, rather than as one more branch of a single word. Either way the sense is clear enough wherever the context is a treaty, a surrender, or a friendship.