NW, We) Similarly, at Hebrews 10:20 some translate it “dedicated” (AS, Dy, Sp), others, “inaugurated.” (CC, Mo, NW) Jesus called attention to the traditional teachings of the Pharisees in regard to “corban,” that is, a gift dedicated to God. (Mark 7:11; Matt. 15:5; see CORBAN.) Jesus also warned that the time was coming when Herod’s temple, together with its “fine stones and dedicated things [a·na·theʹma·sin],” would be thrown down.—Luke 21:5, 6.

DEED

A written agreement duly signed and sometimes sealed containing the legal terms for the accomplishment of an intended purpose; the documented instrument for the transfer of real estate. The Bible’s only use of the Hebrew word seʹpher in this particular sense concerns Jeremiah’s purchase of a field from his cousin Hanamel.—Jer. 32:6-15.

The details surrounding the drawing up of this deed are interesting. The money for the purchase, “seven shekels and ten silver pieces,” was weighed out in the presence of witnesses. (Jer. 32:9) If this stipulation of ‘seven and ten’ is assumed to be a legal form meaning seventeen silver shekels ($8.07), it would be a reasonable price considering the time and circumstances under which the property was sold. It was a time of war and famine (not many months before Jerusalem was captured by Nebuchadnezzar).

When the money was paid, two deeds, presumably identical, were drafted ‘according to the judicial commandment and legal regulations.’ One of these was known as “the deed of purchase, the one sealed,” and the other was called “the one left open.” (Jer. 32:11) Only the first one is said to have been signed by witnesses, the whole transaction taking place “before the eyes of all the Jews who were sitting in the Courtyard of the Guard.” (Vs. 12) Both deeds were then placed in an earthenware jar for safekeeping.—Vs. 14.

The custom of making duplicate deeds but sealing only one was very practical. Leaving one copy open permitted it to be referred to by the interested parties. If it was ever damaged, or its authenticity called in question, or if there was suspicion that it had been altered, then the sealed copy could be presented to the city judges who, after examining the seal, would break it open and make a comparison of the two copies.

DEKER

(Deʹker) [piercing].

Father of one of Solomon’s twelve deputies. Deker’s son provided food for Solomon and his household one month out of the year apparently from the region of southern Dan.—1 Ki. 4:7, 9.

DELAIAH

(De·laʹiah) [Jehovah has drawn up (in deliverance)].

1. An Aaronic priest of David’s time designated by lot as the head of the twenty-third priestly division.—1 Chron. 24:1, 5, 18.

2. Son of Shemaiah; one of the princes in the court of King Jehoiakim that heard Baruch read the book written by Jeremiah and thereafter apparently made report to the king. Then, at the time the roll was read before Jehoiakim, Delaiah and two other princes vainly pleaded with him not to burn it.—Jer. 36:11-26.

3. The forefather of certain ones that came to Jerusalem with Zerubbabel in 537 B.C.E. but who were unable to prove whether they were Israelites.—Ezra 2:1, 59, 60; Neh. 7:61, 62.

4. Son of Mehetabel and the father of the Shemaiah who was hired by Sanballat and Tobiah to intimidate Nehemiah the governor.—Neh. 6:10-13.

5. One of Elioenai’s seven sons; descendant of David through Solomon and Zerubbabel.—1 Chron. 3:10, 24.

DELILAH

(De·liʹlah) [languishing (with desire), flirt].

A woman living in the torrent valley of Sorek. Delilah is introduced into the Bible account toward the final part of Samson’s twenty-year judgeship as the object of his love.—Judg. 16:31.

The axis lords of the Philistines, anxious to destroy Samson, each offered Delilah 1,100 pieces of silver to find out for them wherein Samson’s might lay. She cooperated by questioning Samson as to what would render him powerless. Each time Samson answered she notified the Philistines and hid Philistine warriors in her house, ready to take advantage of Samson in the event he lost his strength. After three misleading answers by Samson, Delilah continued to pester him and “pressured him with her words all the time and kept urging him, [so that] his soul got to be impatient to the point of dying.” Then he told her of his Naziriteship and that no razor had ever touched his head. Certain of having the truth this time, she sent for the Philistine axis lords, and they came to bring her the money. While Samson slept upon her knees, an attendant cut off the seven braids of his hair. Upon awakening, Samson found that this time his divinely provided power was not there. The hiding Philistines grabbed hold of him, blinded him and took him prisoner. (Judg. 16:4-21) Delilah is mentioned no more in the Bible account.

There is no indication that sexual relationship took place between Delilah and Samson or that she was a prostitute. The unnamed prostitute mentioned at Judges 16:1, 2 is not the same as Delilah. This prostitute lived at Gaza, whereas Delilah lived in the valley of Sorek. Also, the following evidence indicates Delilah possibly was an Israelite, not a Philistine: When the axis lords presented their proposal it was based on an extravagant sum of money.—Judg. 16:5.

DELTA

Delta [Δ, δ].

The fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, a consonant that corresponds generally to the English “d.”

Delʹta is derived from the Hebrew daʹleth, and, as a number, denotes four when it has an acute accent (δʹ), and 4,000 when it has the subscript (====δ).—See ALPHABET.

DELUGE

The catastrophic destruction of men and animals by an overwhelming flood in the days of Noah, 2370 B.C.E. This greatest cataclysm in all human history was sent by Jehovah because wicked men had filled the earth with violence. The survival of righteous Noah and his family, eight souls in all, together with selected animals, was by means of a huge ark or chest.—Gen. 6:9–9:19; 1 Pet. 3:20; see ARK No. 1; NOAH No. 1.

EXTENT OF THE DELUGE

This was no local flash flood or cloudburst. Local floods come and go in a matter of days; this one lasted over a year, the greater portion of which was required for the water to subside. How unreasonable to believe that Noah spent perhaps fifty or sixty years building a huge vessel of more than one and a fifth million cubic feet in volume for the survival of his family and a few animals from a mere local flood! If only a comparatively small area was affected, why the need of bringing into the ark specimens of “every living creature of every sort of flesh” in order to “preserve offspring alive on the surface of the entire earth”? (Gen. 6:19; 7:3) Definitely this was a global deluge, the like of which never occurred before or since. “The waters overwhelmed the earth so greatly that all the tall mountains that were under the whole heavens came to be covered. Up to fifteen cubits [c. 22 feet (6.7 meters)] the waters overwhelmed them and the mountains became covered.” (7:19, 20) “The end of all flesh has come before me,” Jehovah said, hence “I will wipe every existing thing that I have made off the surface of the ground.” And it was just so. “Everything in which the breath of the force of life was active in its nostrils, namely, all that were on the dry ground, died. . . . only Noah and those who were with him in the ark kept on surviving.”—6:13; 7:4, 22, 23.

TIMING OF THE DELUGE

The Deluge did not come suddenly without warning. Years of time were spent building the ark, time that Noah the “preacher of righteousness” also used in warning that wicked generation. Finally the time limit was up “in the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month.” The “male and female of every sort of flesh” had been brought into the ark with Noah’s family, as well as a sufficient food supply for all, and “after that Jehovah shut the door.” Then “the floodgates of the heavens were opened.” (Gen. 7:11, 16) An incessant torrential downpour for “forty days and forty nights”; “the waters continued overwhelming the earth” a hundred and fifty days. (7:4, 12, 24) Five months after the downpour began, the ark “came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.” (8:4) It was nearly two and a half months later before “the tops of the mountains appeared” (8:5), another three months before Noah removed the ark’s covering to see that the earth had practically drained (8:13), and nearly two months later when the door was opened and once again the survivors set foot on dry ground.—8:14-18.

Noah and his family entered the ark in the 600th year of Noah’s life, the 2d month (October-November), the 17th day. (Gen. 7:11) One year later (a year consisting of 360 days) was the 17th day, 2d month, 601st year. Ten days after that would be the 27th day of the 2d month, when they came out; a total of 370 days, or parts of 371 separate days, spent in the ark. (8:13, 14) In the log that Noah kept, it appears he used months of 30 days each, 12 of them equaling 360 days. In this way he avoided all the complicated fractions involved had he used strictly lunar months consisting of slightly more than twenty-nine and a half days. That such calculations were used in the account is made certain when 150 days is said to equal five months.—7:11, 24; 8:3, 4.

SOURCE OF THE WATERS

It has been said that if all the moisture in the atmosphere were suddenly released as rain it would not amount to even a couple of inches if spread over the earth’s surface. So from what source was this vast deluge of Noah’s day? The account of creation tells how Jehovah made an expanse of atmosphere about the earth, and this expanse formed a division between the waters below it, the oceans, and the canopy of water above it.—Gen. 1:6-8.

Says The Zondervan Pictorial Bible Dictionary, 1964, page 285: “Recently, scientists have discovered a region in the upper atmosphere, called the thermosphere, where temperatures range between 100 and 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (D. R. Bates, ‘Composition and Structure of the Atmosphere,’ The Earth and Its Atmosphere, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1957, pp. 104-105). High temperature is the chief requisite for retaining a large quantity of water vapor. Furthermore, it is known that water vapor is substantially lighter than air and most of the other gases making up the atmosphere. There is nothing physically impossible, therefore, about the concept of a vast thermal vapor blanket once existing in the upper atmosphere.”

This, then, is what the apostle Peter was talking about when he recounts that there was “an earth standing compactly out of water and in the midst of water,” and that “by those means the world of that time suffered destruction when it was deluged with water.” (2 Pet. 3:5, 6) Up until the Deluge, the “heavens in ancient times” very evidently had an altogether different appearance than they do today. With the canopy of water vapor a “greenhouse effect” was created that provided even the polar regions with a tropical temperature, as geologists well know existed at one time. With the canopy, there was no need for it to rain, “but a mist would go up from the earth and it watered the entire surface of the ground.” (Gen. 2:5, 6) Not until after the Flood does the Bible first mention the lightning and thunder. Not until after the Flood was a rainbow visible. (9:13) Not until after the Flood does the Bible speak of “cold and heat, and summer and winter.”—8:22.

EFFECT ON EARTH’S SURFACE

With the Deluge great climatic changes came suddenly. Other changes also came, for example, the life-span dropped very rapidly. Some have suggested that the watery canopy prior to the Flood shielded out some of the harmful radiation, and with the canopy gone, free cosmic radiation genetically harmful to man increased. It has also been suggested that such increase in radiation may have accounted for the increase in varieties of bird and animal life within the basic family kinds that emerged from the ark. However, these theories cannot be proved either true or false, for the Bible is silent on the matter. Incidentally, any great change in radiation would have altered the rate of formation of radioactive carbon-14 to such an extent as to invalidate all radiocarbon ages prior to the Flood.

With the sudden collapse of this vast canopy untold billions of tons of water deluged the earth. This great added weight may have caused tremendous changes in earth’s surface. The earth’s crust is very thin (estimated at between twenty [32 kilometers] and one hundred miles [161 kilometers] thick), stretched over a rather plastic mass thousands of miles in diameter. Hence, under the added weight of the water great shiftings in the crust likely came. In time new mountains evidently were thrust upward, old mountains rose to new heights, shallow sea basins were deepened, new shorelines were established so that now four-fifths of the surface is covered with water.

This shifting in the earth’s crust accounts for many geological phenomena, such as the raising of old coastlines to new heights. Mighty hydraulic forces were set on a rampage—angry waves smashing mighty boulders together and drifting them great distances from their native setting, raging waters carving out valleys and canyons in all parts of the earth, tidal waves heaping up strange sedimentary deposits and burying beneath their thick layers the debris of animal and plant life. It has been estimated by some that water pressures alone were equal to two tons per square inch (6.45 square centimeters), sufficient to fossilize fauna and flora quickly.—See The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, Patten, 1966, p. 62.

With the removal of the insulating canopy the polar regions were suddenly plunged into a deep freeze and many forms of animal life were refrigerated for thousands of years. Glacial pressures were brought into play. However, the great gorges of the earth and the drifts of debris can be accounted for only by irresistible, incompressible water on the rampage, rather than by continental glaciers of so-called ice ages.

Other evidence of a drastic change: Remains of mammoth elephants and rhinoceroses have been found in different parts of the earth. Some of these were found in Siberian cliffs; others were preserved in Siberian and Alaskan ice, and when exposed and thawed out, were eatable. Some of these giants of the animal kingdom were caught so suddenly in the Deluge they were found with undigested food in their stomachs or still unchewed in their teeth. In a cave in Sicily more than twenty tons of bones were recovered in a six-month period, bones of elephants, deer, oxen and hippopotami, which evidently had taken refuge in the cave from the rising water. The fossil remains of many other animals, such as lions, tigers, bears and elk, have been found in a common strata, indicating that all these creatures were destroyed