a garment, especially the ordinary outer wrap worn over the tunic; by extension, clothing in general
This was the everyday outer wrap of an ordinary Israelite, worn by men and women alike. It was a large rectangular piece of cloth, usually wool and sometimes linen, draped over the inner tunic and belted. People wore it through the day and slept wrapped in it at night.
One garment did many jobs, which is why it turns up in so many kinds of scene. It was daytime clothing and a nighttime blanket. It served as a bag: you could bundle food or loot inside it, or spread it out to collect a pile of gold. For a poor person it was often the single most valuable thing they owned, so it could be handed over as security for a loan, and the law insisted it be given back each evening so its owner had something to sleep in. People tore it in grief, spread it as evidence, and gave it as a lavish gift.
Hebrew writes this one word two ways, swapping the middle two letters. The spelling that heads this page is the commoner of the two; the other spelling (שַׂלְמָה) accounts for sixteen of the word's uses. Nothing in the meaning changes with the spelling: the law about a pledged cloak uses one spelling in one line and the other in the next, and scholars count them as a single word, so both are treated together here.
Usually the word points to that one specific wrap. Sometimes, though, it widens to mean clothing in general, the whole of what a person wears, and this broader use tends to show up when the word is plural. Because everyone knew the garment and what it did, it also works as a picture: a poet can describe God wrapping himself in light the way a person pulls this cloak around his shoulders.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether śimlāh is a semantically distinct term for the concrete outer wrap or simply overlaps with the general word for clothing (בֶּגֶד).
- majorityśimlāh is a marked term the writers choose when naming the specific, visible outer garment rather than clothing as a class, so its distribution is literarily meaningful.; M. Navon, 'Beged or Simlah — Is There a Difference?' Jewish Bible Quarterly 32/4 (2004): 245–51; BDB, s.v. שׂמלה, p. 971
- minorityThe two terms overlap; śimlāh carries only the minimal sense "garment, clothing", with syntactic context doing the semantic work.; D. J. A. Clines, Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 8, s.v. שׂמלה