balal

At its heart this verb describes combining things so thoroughly that they become one mass: most often flour and oil kneaded together for an offering, but also wetting and saturating something, or people blending into a crowd. The same picture of stirring distinct things together is what makes the famous use at Babel work. When God confounds human speech, the languages are not destroyed but jumbled, mixed up so no one can sort out anyone else's words.

The range runs from the kitchen to the courtroom of heaven. In the priestly instructions it is a concrete, repeated recipe word for a grain offering: fine flour blended with oil. Once it leaves that setting it picks up a figurative edge. Ephraim mixing himself in among foreign nations is the same act of blending, now a charge of compromise. The confusion of tongues is mixing turned punitive, a deliberate scrambling rather than a careful combining.

Readers should not assume the senses are unrelated. Scholars treat the confounding of speech at Babel as this one verb stretched to fit a memorable play on the sound of the name Babylon, not as a different word that happens to look the same.

A man takes travelers into his home for the night and puts out feed for their donkeys. This is the only place the verb is used this way, and it sits a little apart from the rest. The standard reference dictionaries list it as a separate entry meaning to provide fodder, most likely formed from a related noun for mash or mixed feed, the kind of moistened, mixed grain animals are given. The underlying picture is still mixing: feed is grain wetted and stirred. But because here it simply means to feed the animals, the everyday English word fits cleanly and there is no overlap with the offering or the confusion senses.