a hidden thing: what has been concealed and lies out of human reach, above all the secrets God alone can see
This noun is built from the verb meaning "to conceal" (עָלַם), and it names the result of the hiding rather than the act. It is not the covering up; it is the thing that has been covered up. English Bibles render it "secrets" or "the hidden thing."
It appears only three times, all in poetry, and every time it marks a boundary of what people can know. Twice it comes in the phrase "the secrets of" something: the secrets of wisdom, which run deeper than anyone can follow (Job 11:6), and the secrets of the heart, which a person can keep from every neighbor but not from God (Psalm 44:21). The third time, in Job's poem about digging into the earth, it is a concealed thing that a miner drags up out of the dark into the light (Job 28:11), a small human triumph the poem then sets against the wisdom no shaft ever reaches.
So the word is less about somebody keeping a secret than about the limits of sight. What it names is genuinely out of view, and the question in each place is who can see it anyway. In Job the answer is that God can and people cannot. In Psalm 44 that same answer is a comfort, because a nation protesting its innocence wants a judge who can read what is hidden inside it.
Hebrew has a whole family of words for hiding, and this one keeps to a narrow corner of it:
- סֵתֶר is the broad word for secrecy and for a sheltered place where someone is out of view.
- טָמַן is burying something under the ground.
- כָּחַד is holding back what you know when you speak.
- צָפַן is storing something away out of sight, often for safekeeping.
Those four are all about hiding as something a person does. This word alone names the hidden contents themselves, and it is reserved almost entirely for what God knows and we do not.
Nuances
Whether the second half of Job 28:11 speaks of a hidden thing brought to light, and whether the word there means a secret or the dark depths.
- majorityThe Hebrew text stands in the second half of the verse, where the word means an ordinary hidden thing or secret; the textual problem lies in the first half, which is repointed to "the sources of the rivers" on the strength of the Ugaritic phrase for the sources of the two rivers.; D. J. A. Clines, Job 21-37, WBC 18A (Nashville: Nelson, 2006), 889-926; M. H. Pope, Job, Anchor Bible 15, 3rd ed. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1973); N. C. Habel, The Book of Job, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985); J. E. Hartley, The Book of Job, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988); E. Dhorme, A Commentary on the Book of Job, trans. H. Knight (London: Nelson, 1967); H. L. Ginsberg, "The Ugaritic Texts and Textual Criticism," JBL 62 (1943): 111; G. M. Landes, BASOR 144 (1956): 32-33
- minorityThe Hebrew consonants stand, but in this poem of buried water and buried ore the word leans toward the dark hidden depth rather than a secret, and is better rendered "the dark thing".; S. C. Jones, Rumors of Wisdom: Job 28 as Poetry, BZAW 398 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009)
- minorityThe Septuagint reflects a different underlying Hebrew text in which the line speaks of laying bare the depths of the rivers, so no word for a hidden thing stood in the translator's copy.; Septuaginta, ed. A. Rahlfs, at Job 28:11