shalem

The major lexica (BDB, HALOT, DCH) and theological dictionaries (TDOT, NIDOTTE, TWOT #2401) agree that the adjective centers on wholeness, intactness, and completeness, applied to stones, weights, buildings, armies, deported populations, safe travelers, and the heart. HALOT makes the commitment explicit, taking the root's Grundbedeutung to be Ganzheit / Unversehrtheit (wholeness / intactness) and marking its dissent from Gerleman, who argued in TLOT and in his 1973 ZAW essay that the root's basic value is requital or paying in full (a view Eisenbeis reached independently in 1969). Stendebach and Nel resist the inversion, reading restitution as a specific application of restoring wholeness rather than its origin, and the adjective is the form that most cleanly supports the majority view, since no use of it requires the notion of payment. The Semitic cognates (Akkadian shalmu of intact persons, animals, and cities; Ugaritic and Arabic reflexes) support wholeness as the anchor. More than half of the occurrences fall in the phrase levav shalem toward YHWH; Weinfeld connected it to the exclusive-loyalty language of Deuteronomy and Neo-Assyrian treaties, Japhet showed the Chronicler pairs it with lev echad (one heart) so that the core is undividedness rather than moral perfection, and Endres treats wholeheartedness as a distinctively Chronistic theme. The ancient Greek Old Testament typically renders the term with teleios, the bridge later exploited in the New Testament.