a man: one human being singled out, most often a grown male, but just as readily a husband, a person of a certain kind, or simply "each one".
At its simplest this word points at one human being, and in most places that human being is a grown male. But the word is unusually light on its feet. What it really does is pick someone out in relation to something else: to a woman, to a group, to a trade, to the person standing next to him. The setting, far more than the word itself, supplies the color.
That is why one short Hebrew word lands in English so many different ways.
- Set beside the word for woman (אִשָּׁה) it means a male, and it is the ordinary word for a woman's husband, literally "her man".
- Joined to a describing word it labels a person by trade, quality, office, or homeland: a man of God, a man of war, a man of the field.
- Put in front of a people's name it can gather a whole army or population into one body, so that "the man of Israel" musters, fights, and speaks as a single actor.
- In case law it thins out to "anyone" or, with a negative, "no one", and in paired phrases it thins further still, to "each" or "one another", where English simply drops it.
Its furthest reach shows how light the word really is. It is used of animals pairing off two by two, of the halves of a divided carcass laid opposite one another, and of the golden creatures on the ark facing each other. None of those is a man. In those places the word carries nothing but "each one, over against its counterpart".
Scholars still argue about which end of that range is the true center: whether maleness is built into the word and everything else is an extension, or whether the word is basically about placing someone in a relationship and maleness is just what the surrounding story usually supplies. Both sides agree on what the word does in any given verse; they disagree about what it carries before the verse gets to it.