halakh

This is the everyday Hebrew word for going, and one of the most common verbs in the whole Old Testament. People go up and down, come and depart, set out and arrive; armies march, animals move, ships and water travel, time moves on. So much of the narrative runs through it: someone gets up and goes, and the story goes with them. Because it is the plain word for travel, English Bibles render it many ways depending on direction and context (go, come, walk, depart, follow, journey), but the Hebrew is making one simple claim each time: something is in motion along a course.

Its power comes from where that course leads. Very early the word stops being only about the feet and becomes about the life. The Bible pictures a whole existence as a road being walked, and this is the verb that carries it:

• to walk in the law of the LORD is to order one's whole life by it
• to walk after other gods is to betray him for them
• to walk with God is to live one's days in his friendship

That last phrase names one of Scripture's most intimate relationships with God. A few people are said to walk with God or walk before him: Enoch and Noah, and Abraham, who is told to walk before God and be blameless. Here the word means a manner of living carried on consciously in God's presence and approval. The word reaches in the other direction too: it can quietly mean to pass away, to go the way of no return, the Hebrew way of speaking gently about death.

When the word is turned to mean making someone go, it means to lead, bring, or carry along a road: God leads his people through the wilderness, or a conqueror carries a captured king off into exile. Hebrew also loves to double the word for emphasis, so that a person does not merely go but goes on and on, growing greater and greater or weeping the whole way. Whether someone walks, roams, is led, or slips away in death, the core picture holds: movement along a path, literal or moral.