Westward

In biblical Hebrew, westward is expressed as yammah, meaning "seaward" — toward the sea, since the Mediterranean lay to the west of Israel. This spatial orientation was built into the Hebrew vocabulary: yam means both "sea" and "west." Deuteronomy 3:27 uses the term when God tells Moses to look north, south, east, and west (yammah) from Mount Pisgah to behold the promised land he would not enter. The directional terms of biblical Hebrew thus reflect the geographical setting of the authors, who oriented themselves with the east (sunrise) as the primary direction — hence the east is "before" (qedem), the west is "behind" (achar or yam), the south is "right hand" (yamin), and the north is "left hand" (smol). This geographical vocabulary shaped the symbolic associations of directions in prophetic and poetic literature.