halal

This is the dominant biblical use, and it gives us the word Hallelujah, which simply means "praise the LORD." To praise here is not a private feeling but a public act: voicing aloud how great and good someone is, so that others hear it. The Psalms turn it into a summons, calling on everyone and everything to join in.

Most often the one praised is God, celebrated for who he is and for what he has done. The word can also describe people praising a person, such as the courtiers admiring Sarai's beauty or a city's elders blessing a worthy woman, but the center of gravity is worship. A closely related form means to be praiseworthy, that is, to be the kind of person or God who deserves such acclaim.

The sense runs from a single voice giving thanks to the massed, instrument-backed praise of the temple, and finally to the whole created order being called to praise its maker.

This use turns the act of praising back on the speaker or on what the speaker prizes. To boast is to make much of something out loud, to find your confidence and your bragging rights in it. The Bible treats this as a double-edged thing.

Boasting in your own wealth, strength, beauty, or wisdom is folly, because none of those can save you, and the prophets mock the nations and the proud for it. The same word, redirected, becomes the right kind of glorying: the only safe boast is to glory in the LORD, to make him the thing you are proud of and known by. The contrast is sharp and deliberate, as when Jeremiah says the wise should not boast in wisdom but only in knowing God.

The link to praise is natural: boasting is praise aimed at the wrong target, and glorying in God is praise that has come home to the right one.

A smaller but distinct group of uses pushes the idea of boasting past arrogance into outright madness. Here the word is not pride that needs deflating but reason that has come unhinged: raving, acting like a fool, behaving as though the wits are gone.

David feigns this when he scratches at the gates of Gath to escape a hostile king, acting like a madman. Wisdom literature uses it for the folly that destroys good sense, as when oppression drives even a wise person out of their mind. The boastful, the senseless, and the godless overlap in these texts: the proud who glory in themselves are, in the Bible's eye, not far from the raving fool.

This sense is close enough to wrong boasting that some treat them as one range, but the texts that clearly mean madness rather than pride are gathered here.

A separate and much rarer use, found mainly in Job and one line of Isaiah, means simply to shine or give light. It describes the sun, the moon, the stars, and the flashing of a sea creature's snorting.

Many scholars connect this to praise by way of an underlying idea of brightness, since to praise can be to make something shine in others' eyes. Whether or not that connection is real, the texts that mean ordinary physical light are gathered here on their own, because no reader would reach for the word praise to translate them.

This is the use that may stand behind the name of the morning star in Isaiah 14, the shining one that later tradition called Lucifer.