besvorah

This is the noun that belongs to the runner. News from a battlefield or a besieged city traveled by a man who ran, and what he carried in his mouth was this word. All six of its appearances sit in Samuel and Kings, and four of them crowd into one scene: David waiting at the city gate while two runners race toward him with word of the battle in which his son Absalom has died (2 Samuel 18).

That scene is also what makes the word worth slowing over. A runner's news is normally something to celebrate, so Joab refuses to let Ahimaaz go at all, telling him he is not a man of news today, because the king's son is dead. When the watchman spots a second runner, David says a man coming alone must have news in his mouth, and once he hears who it is, he decides that a good man comes with good news. Every line of that exchange leans on an expectation the word carries, that a runner arrives with something the hearer will be glad to hear, and the story gets its ache from breaking it.

The one occurrence outside that scene points the same way. Four men with a skin disease find the Aramean camp abandoned and the siege of Samaria lifted, and they tell each other that this day is a day of good news, too good to keep to themselves (2 Kings 7:9).

The verb behind this noun (בָּשַׂר) travels much further, into temple worship and into Isaiah's announcement that God reigns, and it is that line of use, not this noun, that the Greek word for gospel (εὐαγγέλιον) inherits. The noun itself never leaves the world of couriers and kings.

Carrying news was paid work, and the payment took the name of the news itself. David, recalling the man who came to him at Ziklag announcing Saul's death and expecting to be treated as a bearer of good news, says that what he handed him instead was death (2 Samuel 4:10). Part of the bite of the line is that the word for the runner's fee and the word for his message are one word.

The same expectation of payment stands behind Joab's second refusal in the Absalom story, when he asks Ahimaaz why he wants to run when there is nothing in it for him (2 Samuel 18:22). Readers have long divided over whether Joab means that no fee is waiting or simply that no news is left to carry.

Greek did the same thing with its own word. Long before it meant gospel, εὐαγγέλιον named the tip you gave the messenger who arrived with welcome news, which is how Homer uses it. Two languages, the same slide from the message to the money paid for it.