beli

This is one of the Hebrew Bible's words for negation, built from a root meaning to wear out or come to nothing. In practice it almost always functions like the English words without, not, and for lack of, attaching to a noun or an action to say that the thing is missing or did not happen.

Its shades shift with the grammar around it. On its own it usually means simply without something: without water, without clothing, without salt. With a small prefix added (often translated for lack of or because there is no), it tips toward giving a reason, blaming a disaster on something that was absent. A few fixed phrases recur often enough to feel like set expressions in their own right: without knowing for an accidental, unintended act, until there is no more for limitless abundance, and a pointed question, Is it really because there is no...?, used to expose a foolish choice.

These are not separate words but one negating word leaning in different directions depending on what it is denying and what comes before it. The reader's task is to notice whether it is denying a thing (without bread), a reason (for lack of bread), or an action (without telling him).

Far less common, this is the concrete idea underneath the word: the wearing-out or decay that destroys something. It appears clearly in Isaiah's prayer of thanksgiving, where a man rescued from death speaks of the pit of decay, the grave that eats the body away.

Because this sense is rare and so close in form to the ordinary negative word, scholars do not all agree it is truly separate; some read even Isaiah's phrase as the negative (the pit of nothingness, of non-being). It is listed here as its own meaning because the major lexicons recognize a genuine idea of destruction in the root, distinct from plain negation.