there: the place already named, pointed at instead of named again
This is the ordinary Hebrew word for "there." It points back at a place the writer has just named, so that the place does not have to be repeated: the garden God planted, the altar a traveller built, the city where a king died. It stands in more than seven hundred verses, spread evenly across every kind of writing in the Old Testament, which makes it one of the plainest and most common words in the language. Its opposite is the word for "here" (פֹּה), the spot where the speaker is standing; the Aramaic chapters of Ezra and Daniel use the matching Aramaic word (תַּמָּה).
Hebrew shapes it three ways, and English needs a different phrase for each:
- the plain form for being in a place, as in "there she was buried"
- a slightly longer form for heading to a place, as in "flee there," which older Bibles render "thither"
- the same word with a small "from" fastened to the front, as in "and from there the river divides"
The split between the first two is a strong habit rather than a rule. Poetry and the later books blur it, so the longer form can mean simply "there" with no movement at all (Joshua 2:1; Jeremiah 27:22), and the plain form can follow "go" or "come" where the longer one is expected (Deuteronomy 1:37).
Hebrew also has no separate word for "where" inside a phrase like "the place where Joseph was bound." It says something closer to "the place which Joseph was bound there," letting this small word do the work at the end. Hundreds of verses are built that way, which is why English Bibles so often translate it "where" rather than "there."
Two stretches of the Bible give the little word real weight. Deuteronomy names the one lawful place of worship as the place the LORD will choose "to put his name there" (Deuteronomy 14:23; 16:2; 26:2), and Ezekiel closes his book by naming the restored city "The LORD Is There" (Ezekiel 48:35). Both are playing on sound: the word for "there" and the word for "name" (shem) are nearly identical to the ear, though they come from different origins. Job and Ecclesiastes use it in a quieter way, as a hushed substitute for the grave, a place named only by pointing at it: "naked I shall return there" (Job 1:21), "there the wicked cease from raging" (Job 3:17).
Nuances
What Deuteronomy's formula "to make his name dwell there" (and its twin "to put his name there") claims about God's presence at the chosen sanctuary, across Deuteronomy 12:5, 11, 21; 14:23, 24; 16:2, 6, 11; 26:2.
- contestedDeuteronomy deliberately refines an older picture of God dwelling in the temple: only his name is present at the sanctuary, while God himself remains in heaven.; Gerhard von Rad, Studies in Deuteronomy, trans. David Stalker (1953), 37-39, 90; Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Dethronement of Sabaoth: Studies in the Shem and Kabod Theologies (1982); Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge, 2009)
- contestedThe phrase is a borrowed Mesopotamian royal idiom for "placing a name," that is, installing an inscribed monument to claim territory, so it asserts God's claim on the place rather than separating his name from his presence.; Sandra L. Richter, The Deuteronomistic History and the Name Theology: lesakken semo sam in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, BZAW 318 (2002); Sandra L. Richter, "The Place of the Name in Deuteronomy," Vetus Testamentum 57, no. 3 (2007): 342-366; Ian Wilson, Out of the Midst of the Fire: Divine Presence in Deuteronomy, SBLDS 151 (1995)
- contestedThe Mesopotamian translation of the idiom is right, but it does not by itself settle the theological question of how God is present at the sanctuary, which the wider context has to decide.; Michael B. Hundley, "To Be or Not to Be: A Reexamination of Name Language in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History," Vetus Testamentum 59, no. 4 (2009): 533-555