Lock

The umbrella collects passages where doors and gates are secured — locked rooms, gate-bolts, and the bolt of a private chamber. The vocabulary moves between "lock," "bolt," "bar," and "key."

Ehud's Locked Doors

The Ehud assassination turns on a locked upper room. After striking Eglon, Ehud secures the chamber behind himself: "Then Ehud went forth into the porch, and shut the doors of the upper room on him, and locked them" (Judg 3:23). The locked doors then buy him time. The slaves arrive, find the doors locked, and assume the king is at his chamber-pot: "Now when he had gone out, his slaves came; and they saw, and noticed that the doors of the upper room were locked; and they said, Surely he is relieving himself in the upper chamber" (Judg 3:24). Embarrassment delays them further until they finally fetch the key and open the doors: "they took the key, and opened [them], and saw that their lord had fallen down dead on the earth" (Judg 3:25). The lock and the key together make the escape possible.

Bolts and Bars on the City Gates

Nehemiah's account of the wall-rebuilding inventories each gate by its hardware — doors, bolts, and bars. "The valley gate repaired Hanun, and the inhabitants of Zanoah; they built it, and set up its doors, its bolts, and its bars, and a thousand cubits of the wall to the dung gate" (Neh 3:13). The next gate is rebuilt the same way: "And the dung gate repaired Malchijah the son of Rechab, the ruler of the district of Beth-haccherem; he built it, and set up its doors, its bolts, and its bars" (Neh 3:14). Bolts and bars are the city-gate equivalent of a lock — they hold the gate shut against entry.

The Bolt of the Beloved's Door

Song of Songs uses the same hardware in an intimate register. The beloved rises to open the door for the one outside, and her hands drip myrrh as she touches the bolt: "I rose up to open to my beloved; And my hands dropped with myrrh, And my fingers with liquid myrrh, On the handles of the bolt" (Song 5:5). The bolt here is not a fortification but the small fastening of a private chamber, and the moment is ordinary: a hand on the bolt to let the beloved in.