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The last of these terms, bo’ ’el, “come into,” might seem to have a certain anatomical concreteness, but the way it is repeatedly used argues that it had become a fixed idiom in biblical usage for a man’s first experience of sexual intimacy with a woman, bearing only a vestigial connection with the physical origins of the expression.
Gillis Gerleman, Zephanija: Textkritisch und literarische untersucht (Lund: Gleerup, 1942), p. 40; Arvid Schou Kapelrud, The Message of the Prophet Zephaniah (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1975), p. 34; Carl-A. Keller, Michée, Nahoum, Habakuk, Sophonie, Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament (CAT) XIb (Geneva: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1990), pp. 199–200. Sabottka, Zephanja, pp. 83–84, 91.
Thorkild Jacobsen, “The Graven Image,” in Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, ed. Patrick D. Miller et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), pp. 26–27. Text from Henry C. Rawlinson, The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia (London: British Museum, 1861–1909), vol. 4, pl. 25, col. iii.42–66. Another version of the hymn may be found in Erich Ebeling, Tod und Leben nach der Vorstellungen der Babylonier (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1931), pp. 120–121.
