to crush something all the way down to fine dust or powder, or to be reduced to it.
This is a word about a result more than a method. Other Hebrew verbs name the blow itself: the hammering, the smashing, the treading. This one names what is left once the blow has done its work, and what is left is dust. Writers who want the reader to picture it often add the word for dust outright: ground "to dust", made "small as the dust of the earth".
That is why it belongs to the story of Israel's reforms. Kings who tore down shrines did not stop at breaking them. Moses burned the golden calf, ground what was left until it was fine as dust, and scattered the powder on water for the people to drink; the retelling in Deuteronomy has him throwing the dust into the stream running down the mountain. Josiah did the same to the Asherah pole from the temple and scattered its powder over graves. A gilded statue that has become powder in a riverbed cannot be repaired, recast, or bowed to again, and these accounts pair this verb with the words for shattering (כָּתַת) and for grinding at the mill (טָחַן) to make the finality plain.
The same physical action turns up in quieter places, which is a useful check on reading it as a word for destruction:
- the sacred incense is ground fine before it is set in front of the ark
- grain on the threshing floor is crushed to open the kernel, and the farmer knows when to stop
- enemies in a war song are beaten as fine as the mud of the streets
The last of those is where the word does its heaviest work. When a prophet tells Zion to rise and thresh the nations, or promises that Israel will become a new threshing sledge set loose on mountains, the picture is not merely victory. It is total reduction: what stood as a mountain ends as chaff blowing off the floor.