to push someone or something away by force, shoving it out of the place it held
The picture behind this verb is one body shoving another. It appears in the law about accidental killing, where everything turns on whether a man gave someone a shove out of hatred or without meaning any harm, and in the scene where Elisha's servant moves to push a grieving woman away from the prophet's feet. Nothing about it is gentle or formal: whoever is in the way gets moved by force.
The same shove is what Israel's writers use for the taking of Canaan. God does not merely relocate the nations living there; he pushes them out from in front of his people. That is why the word stands next to the verb for taking over what someone else held, dispossess (יָרַשׁ), rather than replacing it. One word is the push, the other is the moving in.
From there the shove gets applied to whatever a person is standing on:
- a court official is thrust out of the post he holds (Isaiah 22:19)
- Egypt's champion cannot keep his feet, because God shoves him down (Jeremiah 46:15)
- a wicked man is pushed out of the daylight into the dark (Job 18:18)
- even a craving can be shoved aside so that it comes to nothing (Proverbs 10:3)
Notice what the word does not say. It never means to strike, wound, or kill. It only displaces. Whatever follows the push, whether a fall, a death, or an exile, is told by the next verb, not by this one.