davar

This is the Bible's ordinary, all-purpose verb for speaking. At its heart it pictures a person framing words and directing them at someone else, and because almost any act of speech can be described that way, one verb covers nearly the whole field:

• neighbors settling a purchase in ordinary conversation
• the LORD addressing Moses and the prophets
• a king or a commander giving orders
• someone pledging what he will do and then doing it
• enemies trading accusations behind a person's back
• a friend speaking gently to a grieving heart

These are not separate words. They are one verb seen in different settings, and what tells them apart is who is speaking, to whom, and to what end. The shade comes from the situation, not from any change in the word itself, which is why English has to reach for several verbs (speak, tell, command, promise, threaten) to render the one Hebrew word naturally.

It helps to set it beside its close partner אָמַר, "to say." That verb almost always launches the exact words that follow and answers the question "what did they say." This one leans on the act of speaking itself, a speaker addressing a hearer, which is why it slides so easily into commanding, promising, or pleading. It is also the verb behind the noun דָּבָר, "word, matter, thing," and behind the prophetic books' steady refrain that the LORD has spoken and that what he spoke then came to pass.

Two verses in the Psalms use a rare verb that looks exactly like the common word for speaking but does not mean it. In each, God is the one who brings nations down under the feet of his king or his people. The standard modern lexicons treat this as a separate look-alike word built from three letters that also spell other unrelated Hebrew words, including the ones for a plague and for open pasture.

The sense is not in serious doubt: both verses are about conquest, and "subdue" reads naturally. What is argued is where the word came from, and whether it should be filed as a second entry of its own or as a far-flung branch of the speaking word (see the recorded disagreement below). Because the two verses are so few, readers should be slow to build anything on them, and should not read this fighting sense back into the thousand or so verses where the word plainly means to speak.