in the past, previously; the second half of the set phrase "yesterday and the day before," which means "formerly" or "as things used to be."
The word literally names "the day before yesterday," three days back, and it is built on the number three. But the Bible almost never uses it to count days. It lives inside a fixed expression and points to the past in general.
That expression pairs it with the word for "yesterday" (תְּמוֹל): "yesterday and the day before." Taken together the two words simply mean "in the past," "previously," or "the way things used to be." English Bibles usually collapse the pair into a single adverb such as "formerly," "heretofore," "in time past," or "as before."
The same phrase does a lot of different work depending on the sentence:
- a face that has turned colder toward someone than it had been before (Genesis 31:2)
- a workload of bricks demanded "as it used to be" done (Exodus 5:7)
- a killing carried out without any earlier grudge, so it was not planned beforehand (Deuteronomy 19:4)
- a leader the people had already followed back when Saul was still king (2 Samuel 5:2)
On its own the word carries very little; its meaning comes from the pairing. The two halves can even be pulled apart and strung together with "both... and," as when Moses tells God he has never been a good speaker, not before and not now (Exodus 4:10), yet the sense is still the same past-time idiom.