Hebrew word · H4797
מִרְזַח
mirzach
banquet
A social and religious institution: an association of (usually well-off) members who met for ritual feasting and heavy drinking. It often had a patron deity, sometimes its own house and property, and a leader (the 'head of the marzeaḥ').
Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
1) cry, cry of joy, revelry
1a) mourning cry
1a1) perhaps, feast cry
1b) cry of revelry
Abridged from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).
In depth
- Range of meaning
A social and religious institution: an association of (usually well-off) members who met for ritual feasting and heavy drinking. It often had a patron deity, sometimes its own house and property, and a leader (the 'head of the marzeaḥ'). In some settings it was linked to mourning or honouring the dead. In the Hebrew Bible it occurs only here and in Jeremiah 16:5 ('the house of the marzeaḥ', where the context is mourning).
- Against the English
Most modern versions break it into generic activity: 'feasting and lounging' (BSB, NIV, WEB), 'revelry' (ESV), 'banquet' (KJV), 'parties' (NLT). YLT's 'mourning-feast' follows Jeremiah 16:5. None can easily signal that this is the name of a specific institution, a bit like the difference between 'drinking' and 'the club'.
- How it drifted
The word was rare and obscure, so translators fell back on its general sense of a feast. Its institutional meaning was only fully recovered after the Ugaritic texts were discovered (from 1929) and inscriptions were studied.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Ugarit (13th century BC): legal texts about marzeaḥ houses and members, and a myth (KTU 1.114) in which the god El drinks at his marzeaḥ until he collapses. Phoenician: the Marseilles sacrificial tariff and the Piraeus inscription (4th–3rd century BC). An Aramaic ostracon from Elephantine (5th century BC) about money owed to the marzeaḥ. Nabataean and Palmyrene inscriptions, where the 'chief of the marzeaḥ' heads a banquet guild. Later rabbinic tradition (Sifre on Numbers 25) links marzeaḥ with the feast of Baal-Peor. The Septuagint renders it at Jeremiah 16:5 by thiasos, a Greek cultic guild.
Where it appears
Amos · 1
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Amos 6:7 מִרְזַ֥ח [the] revelry of
Therefore, you will now go into exile as the first of the captives, and your feasting and lounging will come to an end.
Here: Not a general word for 'feasting'. This is the technical name of a known institution: a members-only drinking society or banquet association, attested across the ancient Near East and also linked with mourning. Verses 4–6 (couches, choice meat, music, bowls of wine, anointing oil) describe exactly what happened at one.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.