I recently completed a research project on the religious use of the Semitic root qrb come near. The net result was that this root is a thoroughly technical term applied over an extensive field to express a considerable range of inherently related phaenomena. Having covered the Old Testament, the Qumran literature, rabbinic literature, the Qur'an and the Syriac Bible, I established that the religious usage of the root operates mainly (but not exclusively) in three semantic spheres, viz. the cultic, metaphorical and eschatological spheres. We may now discard the latter two as they do not concern us in this paper. As regards the first, a variety of cultic matters is described by the root qrb, their common element being the concept of approaching the holy sphere 1). One nuance in the cultic use of qrb is the subject of our present consideration. I shall endeavour to show that the well-known Greek technical term