ḥevel

At its base this word names a physical rope, the everyday tool for tying, hauling, and tethering. Rahab lowers the spies by it, men drag Jeremiah out of a cistern with it, and a fisherman is imagined snaring a sea-monster on one. The same rope can be a measuring line, stretched out to lay off distances and boundaries.

Because a rope binds and traps, the word reaches naturally into images of being caught. Poets speak of the cords of death or of the grave closing around a person, of cords of guilt that tie the wicked to their own wrongdoing, and of hidden snares set in someone's path. In these places the rope is felt rather than seen: it is whatever holds a person fast.

These uses share one picture, a binding line, even when the line is literal in one verse and a figure of speech in the next. Where the cord becomes the measured share of land it marks off, the sense shifts enough that a reader needs a different English word, and that use is treated separately below.

From the measuring rope comes the land the rope measures. The word names a defined stretch of ground: a region, a district, or the share of territory assigned to a tribe or family. Israel is called the measured portion of the LORD's inheritance, and the seacoast, the district of Argob, and the lands divided among the tribes are all named this way.

The image is of property surveyed and parceled out. To receive such a portion is to be given a fixed place; to have no cord cast for you, as one prophet warns, is to be left out of the division of the land altogether. Reader and translator alike need a word like region or portion here, not rope, which is why this counts as a distinct meaning rather than one more shade of the cord.

A few times the word names not a thing but a group of people gathered into one body, pictured as a company tied together. Saul meets a band of prophets coming down from the high place, and later the same kind of group surrounds him. The shepherd's staff named Union, broken to dissolve the bond between two peoples, carries the same idea of people held together.

The link back to rope is the thought of binding: a company is a set of people joined as if by a common cord. A reader still needs a separate English word, a band or company, so this is kept apart from the literal rope.

This word also names the violent pains of giving birth, the contractions that seize a woman and will not let go. Prophets reach for it again and again to picture terror striking a nation: pangs grip Babylon, Damascus, and Jerusalem like a woman in labor, and the pains come on suddenly and cannot be stopped.

The usage runs from literal birth to figure and back. The pangs of a mother bearing a son stand beside the writhing of wild goats as they calve, and beside the dread that doubles a city over in fear. Standard reference works treat this as a separate word from the rope, sounding the same but meaning something different, and a reader plainly needs the word pangs, not cord, here.

In at least one verse the word carries the sense of destruction or ruin rather than rope or pain. Micah warns that the land is defiled and faces a grievous destruction. Some reference works list this as yet another homonym of the same spelling.

This meaning is thinly attested and overlaps in feel with the gripping pain of meaning four, so its boundaries are debated. It is kept separate here because the sense a reader needs is destruction, not pangs, but the small number of clear cases means the line between the two is not sharp.