ga'al

• Names revulsion felt in the body, so the one who turns away is pictured as sickened by what he leaves rather than as passing a verdict on its worth. God promises that his own being will not grow sick of his people, and later says he has turned from their ruined shrines in disgust.Lev 26:11Lev 26:30
• Reaches past attitudes into physical throwing off: a cow that does not cast her calf before its time, and battle gear flung down and left lying on the field.Job 21:102Sa 1:21
• Describes walking out on your own household in disgust, said of a mother who turned away from her husband and her children.Ezk 16:45

• Both name a decisive break with the covenant, and the warnings of Leviticus 26 set them side by side: to refuse God's rules is also to be sick of them.Lev 26:15Lev 26:43
• Both are used of God turning against his own people, and both are denied together in the same breath when he promises that exile will not be the end of them.Lev 26:44
• Both can voice a frightened question put to God about whether he has finished with his city and his people.Jer 14:19

• Carries a verdict rather than a feeling: something is weighed, found worthless, and set aside. This is why God's putting a king out of office and his passing over one candidate for another is told this way.1Sa 15:231Sa 16:11Sa 16:7
• Covers turning down what is offered for your good, so it is the standard word for refusing teaching, discipline, and sound advice.Pro 3:11Pro 15:32Job 5:17
• Works as the opposite of choosing, naming what a person turns down in the act of picking something else, and it can label the discarded thing itself, like the stone the builders threw out.Isa 7:15Isa 7:16Psa 118:22
• Can be turned on the speaker himself, as Job refuses his own life and takes back his own words.Job 7:16Job 42:6
• The same spelling also carries a wholly separate sense of running or draining away, used of a sore that will not close and of water that soaks off into the ground.Job 7:5Psa 58:7

• It can describe a physical throwing off, not only an inward feeling: a shield flung away on the mountain where Saul fell, and a healthy animal that does not cast off its young before their time.2Sa 1:21Job 21:10
• It breaks a bond the person is already inside, so the disgust shows up as walking out: a woman who abandons her own husband and children, and the anguished question whether God has turned away from Zion itself.Ezk 16:45Jer 14:19
• In the covenant warnings it works in both directions with the same word, God turning against his people and his people turning against his rulings, so it measures one relationship coming apart from either side.Lev 26:11Lev 26:30Lev 26:15Lev 26:44

• Both place the loathing in the soul, the whole inner self, so the revulsion is presented as a person's deepest reaction rather than a passing distaste.Lev 26:11Num 21:5
• Both can name God's own revulsion at people whose practices he will not tolerate, and in both cases that revulsion ends with those people driven out of the land.Lev 26:30Lev 20:23
• Both are used of people turning in disgust from what God has taught them, and in each case a verb meaning "to reject" stands right alongside, so the two words together describe a refusal with revulsion behind it.Lev 26:43Pro 3:11

• It is the sickened weariness of being stuck with something you cannot escape: a mother worn out with her own life because of the local women her son might marry, and a people fed up with eating the same bread day after day.Gen 27:46Num 21:5
• It mixes revulsion with the fear of being overwhelmed by sheer numbers: Egypt reacts this way as the Israelites keep multiplying, and Moab does the same because the people passing by are so many.Exo 1:12Num 22:3
• It belongs to the dealings between nations and their kings, naming both the settled hostility a neighboring ruler holds toward Israel and the dread that invaders plan to force on Judah.1Ki 11:25Isa 7:6Isa 7:16

• Names the revulsion of a bond breaking from within: the covenant partner's very being turns against the one it was joined to.Lev 26:15Lev 26:44Ezk 16:45
• Can describe a physical casting off or hurling away, not only an inner feeling.2Sa 1:21Job 21:10

• Both describe recoiling from something as loathsome and turning away from it in disgust.Lev 26:30Psa 119:163

• Frames its object as an abomination, the category of what is unclean or morally repugnant before God.Deu 7:26Psa 5:6Mic 3:9
• Carries a causative twist: a person can act so detestably that they make themselves the abominable thing.Psa 14:11Ki 21:26Ezk 16:52

• The revulsion is physical, so what is loathed gets thrown off rather than fought: a shield flung down and left lying on the battlefield, and a cow that carries her calf to term instead of casting it early.2Sa 1:21Job 21:10
• In the covenant warnings the same loathing runs both directions, God turning away from his people stated with the very word used for their turning away from the terms he gave them.Lev 26:11Lev 26:15Lev 26:30Lev 26:43
• Even with a whole nation or a city as its object it still pictures a self sickened by them rather than an enemy engaged: Judah asks whether God has grown sick of Zion, and God promises he will not be sickened enough to finish his people off.Jer 14:19Lev 26:44

• Both name God's own refusal of what he will not accept, whether a people who have broken faith or the practices of the nations around them.Lev 26:30Deu 12:31
• Both describe affection souring into loathing inside a family, so that the bond breaks from the inside: a woman walks out on her husband and children, and Amnon's desire for Tamar curdles the moment he has used her.Ezk 16:452Sa 13:15
• Both can put the inner self in the subject's place, so that a person's whole being is said to turn against something it once accepted.Lev 26:15Isa 1:14

• It supplies the ordinary word for an enemy: "those who hate you" becomes a fixed label for adversaries in war songs and in prayers for rescue.Num 10:352Sa 22:41Psa 44:7
• It carries legal weight as a motive, since a court had to establish whether an earlier grudge lay behind a death; that is what made a killing murder rather than an accident.Deu 19:4Deu 19:11Jos 20:5
• It can mark standing rather than feeling: the wife called "hated" is simply the one not preferred, and the marriage laws protect her firstborn son on exactly that footing.Gen 29:31Deu 21:15Deu 21:17
• It is something people are commanded to do, a deliberate refusal they answer for: officials are to be men who hate dishonest gain, and worshipers are told to hate what is evil.Exo 18:21Psa 97:10Amo 5:15

• Names the gut reaction itself: the one doing the loathing is the "soul", so the word reports a feeling of revulsion rather than a decision to dismiss anyone.Lev 26:11Lev 26:30Jer 14:19
• Takes God's own rules and commands as the thing loathed, so it can describe a people sickened by the very terms of the covenant they live under.Lev 26:15Lev 26:43
• Works in plain bodily and everyday settings with no covenant frame at all: a woman sickened by her own husband and children, a warrior's shield fouled on the battlefield, a bull whose breeding never fails.Ezk 16:452Sa 1:21Job 21:10

• Both stand beside the ordinary Hebrew word for rejecting and add a shade that plain refusal lacks, one supplying disgust and the other supplying abandonment.Lev 26:15Psa 89:38
• Both describe God turning against his own covenant people, and both are flatly denied to reassure that he has not finally done so.Lev 26:44Zec 10:6
• Both also run the other direction, with the people as the ones doing the rejecting: they loathe the rules given to them, they throw off what is good for them.Lev 26:43Hos 8:3

• The prayer word for God withdrawing his presence and help: the complaint is that he no longer goes out with the armies and no longer answers the one crying to him.Psa 60:10Psa 44:9Psa 43:2
• Almost always measured in time, so the ache is how long the abandonment will last: forever, for all time, with no end in sight.Psa 74:1Psa 77:71Ch 28:9
• Describes concrete removal from a place or a job: priests barred from serving, temple vessels put out of use, an altar simply left behind.2Ch 11:142Ch 29:19Lam 2:7

• Its whole force is disgust: an inward revulsion that recoils from something, whether a person or the covenant demands themselves.Lev 26:15Lev 26:43
• It can take a thing rather than a person as its object, as when a shield is treated with contempt and cast aside as defiled.2Sa 1:21

• Both can describe the inner self turning away from a person or people, an estrangement of feeling in which one party is emotionally cast off.Jer 14:19Ezk 16:45Ezk 23:17Ezk 23:18

• Its core sense is physical dislocation, a joint wrenched out of its socket.Gen 32:25
• In its causative use it means to impale or hang a body up and leave it exposed, a public execution with no feeling of aversion involved.Num 25:42Sa 21:62Sa 21:9

• Names an inward turning against someone in disgust, the soul rejecting a person or a command rather than staining anything.Lev 26:11Lev 26:15Lev 26:44
• Describes casting off a bond in revulsion, as a wife who loathes her husband or a heart that has come to loathe a city.Ezk 16:45Jer 14:19
• Extends to a plain sense of failing or throwing off, said of a shield cast aside and of a cow that does not lose her calf.2Sa 1:21Job 21:10

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• Names the act of making something dirty or unclean, so that a person or object is stained, polluted, or ritually disqualified.Isa 59:3Dan 1:8Zep 3:1
• Used of offerings and the altar treated with contempt, where cheap or improper gifts pollute what should be holy to God.Mal 1:7Mal 1:12
• Marks a bloodstain or defilement so real it bars a priest from his office or makes a garment untouchable.Ezr 2:62Lam 4:14