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Bible Dictionaries
Bone
Vine's Expository Dictionary of OT Words
or ‛Etsem (עֶצֶם, Strong's #6106), “bone; body; substance; full; selfsame.” Cognates of this word appear in Akkadian, Punic, Arabic, and Ethiopic. The word appears about 125 times in biblical Hebrew and in all periods.This word commonly represents a human “bone.” In Job 10:11, ‛etsem is used to denote the bone as one of the constituent parts of the human body: “Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews.” When Adam remarked of Eve that she was “bone of his bone,” and flesh of his flesh, he was referring to her creation from one of his rib bones (Gen. 2:23—the first biblical appearance). ‛Etsem used with “flesh” can indicate a blood relationship: “And Laban said to [Jacob], Surely thou art my bone and my flesh” (Gen. 29:14).
Another nuance of this meaning appears in Job 2:5 where, used with “flesh,” ‛etsem represents one’s “body”: “But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh [his “body”].” A similar use appears in Jer. 20:9, where the word used by itself (and in the plural form) probably represents the prophet’s entire “bodily frame”: “Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones.…” Judg. 19:29 reports that a Levite cut his defiled and murdered concubine into twelve pieces “limb by limb” (according to her “bones” or bodily frame) and sent a part to each of the twelve tribes of Israel. In several passages, the plural form represents the “seat of vigor or sensation”: “His bones are full of the sin of his youth …” (Job 20:11; cf. 4:14).
In another nuance, ‛etsem is used for the “seat of pain and disease”: “My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest” (Job 30:17).
The plural of ‛etsem sometimes signifies one’s “whole being”: “Have mercy upon me, O Lord; for I am weak: O Lord, heal me; for my bones are vexed” (Ps. 6:2). Here the word is synonymously parallel to “I.”
This word is frequently used of the “bones of the dead”: “And whosoever toucheth one that is slain with a sword in the open fields, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be unclean seven days” (Num. 19:16). Closely related to this nuance is the use of ‛etsem for “human remains,” probably including a mummified corpse: “And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence” (Gen. 50:25).
‛Etsem sometimes represents “animal bones.” For example, the Passover lamb is to be eaten in a single house and “thou shalt not carry forth aught of the flesh abroad out of the house; neither shall ye break a bone thereof” (Exod. 12:46).
The word sometimes stands for the “substance of a thing”: “And they saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness [as the bone of the sky]” (Exod. 24:10). In Job 21:23, the word means “full”: “One dieth in his full strength.…” At other points, ‛etsem means “same” or “selfsame”: “In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham and Japheth, the sons of Noah …” (Gen. 7:13).
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Vines, W. E., M. A. Entry for 'Bone'. Vine's Expository Dictionary of OT Words. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/vot/b/bone.html. 1940.
