to surround and close in on someone from every side, until they are trapped or overwhelmed
This is one of the rarest verbs in the Hebrew Bible, and one of the most dramatic. It appears only five times, and in every single case the speaker is at the edge of death: water rising over the head, the ropes of the grave pulled tight, troubles piling up beyond counting. It is never used for an ordinary event. When a poet reached for this word, he was picturing the terrible moment just before rescue, when a person is completely at the mercy of death.
The action it names is always the same: something closes in around a person on every side until they are trapped. What changes is the thing doing the surrounding, and the English word shifts to match it. When floodwaters do the surrounding, translators say "engulfed" or "swept over"; when the cords of death draw around, they say "encircled" or "bound"; when nameless troubles crowd in, they say "hemmed in" or "surrounded." The verb itself carries none of the water. That comes entirely from what is doing the closing-in.
Because it is so rare and so vivid, the word became a kind of signature for the drowning-and-rescue lament. The Song of David in 2 Samuel 22 and its twin in Psalm 18 both use it as the singer looks back on being pulled from deep waters; Psalm 116 borrows the same line in thanksgiving; and Jonah's prayer from inside the fish is stitched together from this very language. In several of these it is set deliberately beside the ordinary, everyday verb for going around (סָבַב), the plain word laid next to this rare and heavier one.