SHADE, shadow — and in this climate, protection. To stand in someone's tsel is to be under their cover; Lot pleads for his guests because they have come 'under the tsel of my roof' (Genesis 19:8, already on these pages). ⚠ The metaphor is not decorative. In a desert the shade is the thing between a body and the sun, so to say of a people that 'their tsel has turned aside from over them' (Numbers 14:9) is to say the one thing keeping them alive has stepped away. Every version checked on both the English and the Spanish shelf resolves the image into an abstraction — defence, shield, protection, amparo — so the sun disappears from the sentence. The word is also how the Psalms describe God ('the shade at your right hand', Psalm 121:5, already on these pages), which is the same picture turned the other way up. → first discussed at Num 14:9