asaph

This is the everyday core of the word. Something that was spread out or apart is brought together: an army mustered for battle, a crowd called to one spot, a flock driven in, possessions pulled together. The same word covers both the people who do the gathering and the people who are gathered, so it often appears in a form that means the crowd assembled or the troops came together.

From this physical sense the word naturally stretches to the work of harvest. Bringing in a crop is simply gathering what the field has produced before it is lost, so the autumn harvest festival was called the feast of ingathering. The same idea sits behind taking in a stray animal or a homeless traveler: you bring them in off the open and under your own roof.

What ties this whole range together is movement from scattered to collected, from outside to inside, from many places to one. The word says nothing on its own about why things are gathered or what happens next; the surrounding text supplies that.

This sense flips the picture. Instead of bringing something in to keep it, the word means pulling something out of the world so that it no longer remains. God takes away a woman's shame, withdraws his peace and mercy from a people, removes the moon's light, or sweeps everything off the face of the ground in judgment. To gather a person's life or soul is to end it.

The link to the gathering sense is real but the result is opposite: when you gather grain you secure it, but when God gathers away a blessing or a life, what is gathered is withdrawn and lost to the one who had it. Because the same form can mean either, context decides. A harvest gathered in is kept; a harvest gathered up by an enemy or by drought is taken from you.

This sense carries much of the word's emotional weight in the prophets and the laments, where it speaks of loss, the end of a life, or sweeping judgment.