The word mišpāṭ is a ma-noun derived from → שׁפט šāp̱aṭ. In addition to Biblical and Postbiblical Hebrew, it is found in Ugaritic and Phoenician with the meaning “government, authority.”1 The word occurs 422 times in the OT, distributed among most of the books; only Ruth, Esther, Song of Songs, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, and Nahum do not have it. In Hebrew, ma-nouns have a wide range of use. They can refer to the place where the activity denoted by the root takes place,
Volume 9, Page 87