to defile by staining: to soil something, most vividly with blood, until it is polluted or unfit for holy use
At its heart this verb pictures pollution you can see and touch. Where other Hebrew words for impurity are more like abstract labels, this one paints a smear, most often blood on hands or clothing. The starkest picture is God as a warrior treading a winepress until the juice of the trampled nations spatters and "stains" all his garments (Isaiah 63:3). Every other use extends that same basic image of visible staining.
The word carries that one picture into three settings:
- the physical smear of blood on guilty hands and clothing (Isaiah 59:3; Lamentations 4:14)
- a whole city sunk in wrongdoing and so branded "the defiled one" (Zephaniah 3:1)
- worship, where a soiled altar, a blemished offering, a disqualified priesthood, or a compromised diet is made unfit for God (Malachi 1:7; Malachi 1:12; Ezra 2:62; Daniel 1:8)
In worship it works alongside the more systematic words for impurity but adds a vivid twist. When Malachi says the priests "profane" (חלל) God's table by calling it "polluted," the first word delivers the verdict while this word supplies the blunt picture of something soiled (Malachi 1:12). And unlike the standard term for ritual uncleanness (טמא), it comes with no system of washings or sacrifices to undo it: in Ezra the priests who cannot prove their descent are simply shut out of the office as defiled.
Every occurrence falls in the exile or later, and scholars connect it to an older, similar-sounding verb meaning "to loathe or reject" (גָּעַל), most likely reshaped under the influence of Aramaic. That late arrival fits its role: it gave the prophets and post-exilic writers a fresh, picturesque way to say "stained" where earlier writers said "unclean."