bahal

This is the word's home base: the jolt of alarm that hits a person all at once and shakes them to the core. It covers both sides of that experience. Most often it describes the feeling itself, the dread that floods in when bad news lands or danger appears, leaving a person rattled and unable to act. Just as often it describes causing that feeling in someone else, whether an enemy shouting threats over a city wall or God himself breaking in with anger that leaves people undone.

The terror here is not a slow-building worry but a shock. It seizes the body as much as the mind: knees buckle, hands fail, the stomach turns. Scripture reaches for it to picture the moment a nation hears its army has fallen, or the instant a guilty conscience meets judgment.

Because the alarm is so physical and immediate, this same word slides naturally into a second meaning, the frantic speed of someone acting in a panic (see the next meaning). Here, though, the focus is the terror itself rather than the rush it can produce.

Out of the panic of the first meaning grows a second: the headlong speed of doing things in a rush. When alarm takes over, people move fast and think little, and this word came to name that hurried, ill-considered haste on its own, even where no terror is in view.

It can be neutral or even kind, as when an official quickly arranges good things for a person he favors. More often it carries a warning. The wisdom writers use it for the rash tongue, the quick temper, and the inheritance grabbed too soon, treating haste as a failure of patience rather than a virtue. The point is not speed in itself but acting before one should, letting urgency crowd out wisdom.

This meaning is real and well attested, but it stays close to the first. The same word that pictures a panicked nation also pictures a panicked decision, and a reader should feel the family resemblance even while keeping the two ideas distinct.