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At its root this word names a part set off by itself, a single piece kept separate from the rest. By far its most common use is in the phrase that means "alone" or "by oneself", where the word takes a possessive ending so that it reads "in his separateness", "in my separateness", and so on. From there it stretches in two close directions. One is keeping things distinct, counting or handling each piece on its own. The other is the idea of "besides" or "apart from", naming what is left out of a total or added on top of it.

These senses are one thought seen from different angles. Whether the Bible says a person stood alone, that each curtain was joined to itself, or that a number was reached "besides" the women and children, the underlying picture is the same: this one thing held apart from the others. The English word changes, but the Hebrew is making a single point about separateness.

The word almost never stands bare in this meaning. It is normally fixed to the small word for "to" or "from" in front of it, which is why translations render it as a phrase ("by himself", "apart from", "in addition to") rather than a single noun.

This is the same picture of a separate, rod-shaped piece, but here it names a real object: the long poles made for carrying the sacred furniture of the tabernacle. They were overlaid with gold or bronze, threaded through rings on the sides of the ark, the altar, and the table, and used to lift and move these things without touching them directly.

The word appears almost entirely in the building instructions of Exodus and the matching reports of how the work was done, plus the account of the ark being brought into the temple. Because the poles always come in a set, the word here is usually plural ("the poles"). A reader meeting this sense should picture a physical bar, not the abstract idea of being alone.

This sense names the spreading limbs of a plant, the branches or shoots that grow out from a vine. It belongs to the same family of pictures as the carrying pole: a long, rod-shaped part that projects from a larger whole. Here the part is living wood rather than crafted.

It appears only in two related pictures in Ezekiel, where Israel or its rulers are drawn as a vine that puts out branches and then has them consumed. The reader should picture the limbs of a plant, not a manufactured pole and not the idea of being alone.

This rare sense uses the same idea of a separate piece for the parts of a body, its limbs or members. It belongs to the poetry of Job, where death is pictured devouring the parts of a person's body.

Because it is rare and poetic, the exact reference is sometimes argued, and one of its few occurrences is read by some as the bars or gates of the grave rather than bodily limbs. The shared thread is still a part of a larger whole, here the components of a living body.