gamal

This is the word's largest and most far-reaching use, and it drives most of the Bible's theology of reward and consequence. To do this is to bring a completed act back around onto the person who did it, so that a deed and its return belong to one moral arc. The same word covers both directions: dealing kindly and generously with someone, and paying back an offense in full measure.

Because it can swing either way, the direction is usually fixed by what surrounds it. When God is the one dealing bountifully with a person, it is overflowing generosity ("the LORD has dealt bountifully with you"). Yet the very same phrasing, turned negative, becomes the strongest statement in the Psalms that God does not simply pay us back what we have earned: "he has not dealt with us according to our sins." Turned toward an enemy, it names strict, measured payback.

The Hebrew often pairs the verb with its matching noun for effect, so that the crime and the punishment are named with the same word, making the fairness of the return visible in the very wording. Israel's wisdom writings apply the same logic to daily life: a kind person does good to his own soul, and a good wife deals well and never ill with her husband. Underneath every use is a settled conviction that acts come due, and that God is the one who sees them through to their fitting end.

In the ancient world weaning came late, often around age three, and it marked a real milestone: the child had survived infancy and now passed into a new stage of life. So this use is not about deprivation but about completion, a child brought all the way through nursing.

The word carries the weight of those turning points in the stories where it appears. Isaac's weaning is celebrated with a feast, and it is at that feast that the crisis with Hagar and Ishmael erupts. Hannah waits to bring Samuel to the sanctuary until he is weaned, because only then is he old enough to be left there. The image also becomes a picture of settled trust: a soul quieted "like a weaned child with its mother," no longer fretting for what it once cried after.

This is the word's narrowest use, found only twice, both in poetry. It pictures a plant carrying its growth all the way to maturity: Aaron's staff that overnight produces ripe almonds as a sign of God's choice, and a grape that has just come to ripeness before it is cut off in a warning of judgment.

The same idea that unites the whole word is visible here in its simplest form: a process brought to its proper completion. A fruit ripening into what it was always going to become quietly echoes the moral picture elsewhere in the word, where an act likewise ripens into its own fitting result.