oraḥ

This is a poetic word for a path, at home almost entirely in Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and Isaiah. It pictures a beaten track, the line worn into the ground by feet that have gone before. Its more ordinary cousin (the everyday word for road) carries the same image, but this word keeps a higher, more reflective tone, and the poets reach for it when they want to talk about where a life is headed.

Because a path is something you can both walk and watch, the word moves easily between the literal and the moral. It can be the track the sun runs across the sky or the lane the caravans take through the desert. Far more often it is the course of a life: the way of the upright that grows brighter, the way of the wicked that ends in darkness, or the ways of God himself, which are steady love and faithfulness. To know God's path is to know how he acts and how he wants his people to walk.

The senses below are not separate words but one image seen from different angles. A reader follows the picture of a path and lets the surrounding verse decide whether it is dust under sandals or the shape of a whole life. One frozen expression, the "way of women," has drifted far enough from the literal track to be worth listing on its own.

In a handful of places the word does not mean the path but the people on it. Hebrew poetry can name a thing by what is closely tied to it, so the word for a route comes to stand for the wayfarers who follow it, much as we might call a group of riders "the traffic." Job opens his door to the stranger on the road, and pictures the desert caravans straining toward water that has dried up.

This is a small, secondary use, and it grows directly out of the main image: the travelers are simply the path filled with the people who use it. It is listed separately because in these verses the word points to persons, not to the track beneath them.