haphakh

The plain core of the word is rotation: to flip a thing onto its other side, swing it around, or send it back the way it came.

• A cake left unturned on the fire
• A hand pulled around in a chariot
• An army wheeling about
• A guarding sword whirling in every direction
• Hair gone from dark to white on diseased skin

In each, one face or direction gives way to its opposite.

This simple motion is the picture behind everything else the word does. Because turning a thing fully over inverts it, the same verb reaches the idea of tearing a city down (it is tipped upside down), of swapping one state for its reverse, and of twisting what is straight into something crooked. The senses below sort that one motion by what is turned and how far the turn goes.

When what is turned over is a city, a land, or a kingdom, the turning becomes ruin. The picture is of a place tipped upside down and left in rubble. This is the word welded forever to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, where God overthrew the cities of the plain, and it carries that weight wherever it returns. A place so treated is not merely defeated but undone, its whole order inverted into wreckage. The prophets reach for it again and again, holding up Sodom as the pattern of judgment against Babylon, Edom, Moab, and Jerusalem itself.

The word for overturning a city and the word for turning a hand are one and the same. The difference is the scale and the result: here the turn is total and final, so that what stood is now waste and what was inhabited can no longer be lived in.

Here the turn is a transformation: one condition is swapped for its reverse.

• Water is turned to blood
• A rock to a pool of water
• Mourning into dancing
• A feast into grief
• The babble of the nations into a clean, single speech

The before and the after differ in kind, and the word marks the moment one becomes the other. In the Psalms this is above all God's verb of dramatic rescue, the turning of grief into joy.

The sense also covers a change of heart or character, which can run either way.

• A faithful vine turns into a wild one
• An honest tongue goes crooked
• A person is made into someone new
• God himself is said to turn cruel toward a sufferer

Whether the change is for good or for ill, the word names the reversal itself, the turning of a thing into what it was not.

The same turning that overthrows a city and transforms water into blood can be aimed at justice, speech, or truth, and then it means to pervert.

• To turn justice into bitterness
• To twist the words of God
• To be a person of a crooked heart

In each the word marks a moral inversion, the deliberate flipping of what is right into its opposite.

This is the strand the wisdom writers seize on, contrasting the twisted way with the straight path. It is the sharpest edge of the word, because the very motion that can rescue (grief turned to joy) is here turned against the moral grain of things.