the Berasit Hebrew Dictionary

שד

'sed' (pronounced 'shed') means “breasts”. It is the root word of the sedim.

The word is also used to indicate “hills” or “hill country” in a geographic sense, typically by affixes a 'ה' suffix. In this context it is typical to see various translations which come close but somehow miss the obvious “breast” root word as metaphor and instead choose to render 'sedeh' as “fields”, “pastureland”, or “countryside”. This usage is by far the most numerous context of the word, accounting for 336 occurrences

However, there are a few seemingly more dubious translations for a lot of other occurrences:

1. in 3 instances, “plow, harrow”¹⁾
2. in 2 instances, “mistress, concubine”²⁾
3. in 25 instances the ostensible meaning given is “violence, havoc, devastation, ruin” ³⁾(a noun form)
4. in another 57 instances, “to deal violently with, despoil, devastate, ruin, dead”⁴⁾(a verb form)
5. in 48 instances, “The Almighty”⁵⁾ (often pronounced “Shaddai”, and presumed to refer to Ihoh)

Despite the seemingly wide variety of meanings, there is likely some sensible etymology at work here. In the first case, the act of ploughing a field causes the level ground to take on a hilly shape, albeit at a very small scale. It is these small hills and troughs that enable the farmer to plant seeds in the loosened ground. The second case is most likely a euphemism for sex. A mistress is a woman chosen primarily “to be ploughed” in a figurative sense, but one that lives on in modern slang, and in which one's “seed may be planted”.

The third and fourth cases likely stem from the violent nature of ploughing, as it literally rips apart the soil, but may also be influenced by a metaphorical treatment of the third case, essentially a blend of crude parlance equivalent to the modern essence “to be fucked”. it might make sense to simply use “plough” with a note that it is used figuratively.

The fifth case seems to stem from the 3rd/4th. Shaddai is the name given to one so powerful as to be able to easily wreak havoc; a concept which eventually lead to the idea of the omnipresence of the monotheistic “God”.

LexID 7699 - 7706