a tall column of smoke rising against the sky
This word turns up only twice in the Hebrew Bible, and both times in exactly the same phrase: "columns of smoke." It never describes a stone support, a tent pole, or anything solid. It is a word for smoke seen at a distance, gathered into a tall upright shape against the sky, the kind of plume that tells you something is happening over the horizon before you can see what.
Its name almost certainly comes from the date palm (תָּמָר). A straight trunk with a crown fanning out at the top is a fair description of a rising plume, and the older dictionaries glossed the word as a palm-like column that spreads at the top. How much of that picture a Hebrew listener still heard is debated. Later Hebrew went on to build a whole verb out of the image, meaning "to rise straight up like a column of smoke," which suggests the comparison stayed alive for a long time.
What is striking is that the same two words do opposite work in the two places they appear. In Joel the columns of smoke stand between blood and fire as signs that the day of the LORD is coming, and readers have long heard in them the smoke of burning cities. In the Song of Songs the same columns rise off the desert road ahead of a wedding procession, scented with myrrh and frankincense. The picture is identical; the mood comes entirely from what surrounds it. In both places the rising column announces that something momentous is approaching from beyond the horizon.
It is worth keeping this word apart from the ordinary Hebrew word for a pillar or column (עַמּוּד), which covers built columns, the smoke signal over a burning town, and the pillar of cloud and fire that led Israel through the wilderness. That common word does the everyday work. This rare one is kept for a plume of smoke, and only in poetry.
Disputed
Whether the palm image in תִּימָרָה is still semantically live in Joel 3:3 [Eng. 2:30] and Song 3:6, or is a dead metaphor so that the noun denotes no more than a rising smoke-column.
- majorityA dead metaphor. The noun means simply "rising column of smoke"; the palm etymology contributes nothing exegetically to either passage, and the lexica that gloss it plainly "column, pillar" are right to leave the shape out.; DCH, ed. D. J. A. Clines, vol. 8: Sin-Tav (Sheffield Phoenix, 2011), s.v. תִּימָרָה; Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs (AB 7C; Doubleday, 1977), 425; Roland E. Murphy, The Song of Songs (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1990), 148-52; Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs (NICOT; Eerdmans, 2001), 134; Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 119-21
- minorityA live comparison. The noun pictures a column that spreads at the top like the crown of a date palm, and that shape is part of what the word says, which is why the ancient Greek translator of Song 3:6 rendered it with the word for tree trunks.; BDB, 1071, s.v. תִּימָרָה ("(palm-like) column, spreading at the top"); Gesenius, Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch, 18. Aufl., ed. H. Donner et al. (Springer, 1987-2010), s.v. תִּימָרָה (palmenartige Saule); Othmar Keel, The Song of Songs (Continental Commentary; Fortress, 1994), 122-32; LXX Canticles 3:6 (Rahlfs), στελέχη καπνοῦ