tor

Both times the word carries this sense it stands in the same phrase in the book of Esther: a young woman's turn came to go in to the king. The women gathered into the palace were kept in a set order and sent for one at a time, each after a full year of beauty treatments. The word names her slot in that line, the moment the rotation reached her.

The idea behind it is circular movement. The verb it comes from (תּוּר) means to range over a place, going around it to see what is there, and from coming around again you get a turn that comes around to each person in order. Later Hebrew never lost this sense: the everyday word for a queue, or for whose turn it is, is still this word today.

Because Esther is set in a Persian court, readers sometimes assume that a word this administrative must be borrowed from Persian. The scholars who catalogue the genuine Persian words in Esther do not include it. It looks like ordinary Hebrew, simply at home in the later style of this book.

This sense shows up in only two lines of one love poem. A woman is praised because her cheeks are lovely with these ornaments and her neck with strung beads, and then her lover promises to make her ones of gold studded with silver. So much is clear: they are jewelry, they sit at the head and face, they come in a matched set, and gold and silver versions can be made.

What they actually looked like is uncertain, and readers of the poem have gone two ways.

• Some picture braided or twisted circlets, plaited work curving around the face, perhaps even plaits of the woman's own hair.
• Others follow the strung beads named right beside them and picture rows: beads, pearls, or coins threaded on a cord and hung across the forehead and down the neck, the way headdresses were made across the region.

Both readings grow from the same underlying idea of something that goes around, so the choice does not change the picture very much: an ornament that encircles. The difficulty is ancient rather than modern. The Greek translators of the Song did not recognize the word and read it instead as the identically spelled word for a turtledove (תֹּר), so their version praises cheeks that are beautiful as a dove's.