shephi

This word is not about how tall a hill is. It is about how naked its top is: a ridge or hilltop worn down to rock and dust, with nothing growing on it and nothing standing on it to break the wind. Picture the pale, scoured crests above a dry valley rather than a green summit.

Being stripped bare has two consequences, and the Bible leans on both:

• Nothing grows there, so the word stands for country too dry and stony to keep anything alive.
• Nothing hides there, so whatever happens on such ground is in plain sight, and whatever is cried out there carries a long way.

Jeremiah uses both. He tells Israel to lift her eyes to the bare hills and look at what she has done out in the open; he sets a nation's weeping and its funeral song up on them; he shows raiders sweeping across them and wild donkeys standing on them, gasping, because the grass is gone. Isaiah takes the same barren picture and turns it inside out. God will open rivers on the bare heights and give his returning people pasture there, and that is a promise worth making only because bare ground is the last place on earth you would look for water or grass.

One verse stands apart from the rest. In Numbers 23:3 the word appears on its own as Balaam walks away from Balak's altars, and readers have long divided over whether it tells us where he went or how he went. Whichever way that verse falls, keep the word clear of the built hilltop shrines that English Bibles usually call "high places". Those are a different Hebrew word (בָּמָה), and this one says nothing at all about worship.