Hiss

Hissing in the biblical world expressed contempt, scorn, or astonishment at the magnitude of a catastrophe. The Hebrew šāraq denotes a sharp whistling or hissing sound used as a gesture of mockery or shocked amazement, and it appears with striking frequency in the prophetic literature when describing the desolation of cities or nations under divine judgment. When Solomon's temple was destroyed and Jerusalem fell, passersby would hiss at the ruined city as a reflexive expression of horror and contempt.

The threat that Israel would become a hissing and a byword among the nations appears as one of the curses for covenant unfaithfulness (1 Kings 9:8; Jeremiah 19:8; 25:9; Micah 6:16). Zechariah 10:8 employs the same verb in a redemptive reversal: God will hiss (or whistle) for his scattered people to gather them back from exile, turning the signal of judgment into a shepherd's call for his flock. The dual usage—contemptuous scorn and shepherd's summons—reflects the range of associations the gesture carried in ancient Near Eastern culture.