ḥaval

This is the legal and economic use of the word, and it grows out of the older idea of binding something up. A creditor who lends to a poor neighbor takes an item, often a cloak or a tool, and holds it as a guarantee that the loan will be repaid. The thing held is the pledge.

The Bible treats this practice as legitimate but tightly fenced by mercy. A lender may secure a debt, but not by stripping a poor person of what they need to live. The law forbids keeping a cloak overnight, because the borrower sleeps in it, and forbids seizing a millstone, because that is how a family earns its bread. So the same act that is lawful when done justly becomes a cruelty when done greedily, and the prophets and wisdom writers return to it again and again to expose hard-hearted creditors.

The verses gathered here all describe this act of taking or holding security, whether commanded, forbidden, or condemned.

This is a completely different word that happens to be spelled with the same three Hebrew letters. It means to wreck, spoil, or bring to ruin, and by extension to act corruptly or do wrong. It comes from an old Semitic root meaning to harm or oppress, which is unrelated in origin to the idea of binding or pledging, even though the two became identical in sound and spelling in Hebrew.

In the prophets it is the language of catastrophe: agents sent to lay waste a whole land, a destroyer who ruins. In wisdom and later writings it broadens toward moral failure, as when a rash vow ruins a person, or when people are said to have acted corruptly toward God. The shared thread is something good being broken or spoiled, whether a vineyard, a body, a nation, or a covenant relationship.

This sense becomes far more common in the later books of the Hebrew Bible, very likely under the influence of Aramaic, where the everyday word for destroy was built on these same letters. A reader should not assume that because a verse uses this word about destruction it has anything to do with a debtor's pledge, even though the spelling is the same.

In a small handful of poetic verses the word describes the writhing of childbirth, or the conceiving that leads to it. It pictures a body seized and twisted by labor pains, and it can be used as a vivid image rather than a literal birth.

This use most likely belongs with the binding idea, picturing the laboring body as gripped or bound by its pangs, and it sits close to another Hebrew verb for writhing in labor that often appears alongside it. Because it occurs so rarely, the standard reference works disagree over whether it is a distinct word or a stretch of the binding sense, and that uncertainty is noted below.