ḥavar

At its core this word means making two separate things into one. In the instructions for building the tabernacle it is the ordinary word for coupling: curtains fastened edge to edge, shoulder pieces sewn into a single garment, so that many parts hold together as one whole. The prophet Ezekiel uses it the same way for living creatures whose wings touch wing to wing.

The same idea carries over to people. When kings pool their armies, when a king of Judah goes into partnership with a neighboring king, when two royal houses seal a treaty, or when a nation attaches itself to its idols, this is the word. The thing being joined is no longer two independent parties but a single bonded unit, which is why the word can carry a warning: to join yourself to the wrong ally or the wrong god is to be tied to its fate.

Because the picture is fastening rather than merely gathering, English translators reach for different words depending on what is being joined: couple, join, ally, keep company, attach. They are all the same underlying act of binding two into one.

In a handful of texts the word turns from ordinary joining to something darker: the tying of magical knots to cast a spell. It appears only as a title for the practitioner, the charmer, literally the one who ties a tying. In the list of forbidden practices in Deuteronomy it stands among the diviners and mediums Israel is told to have nothing to do with. In the Psalms it pictures a snake charmer whose binding words a deaf serpent will not heed.

This sense grows out of the same root idea as the first meaning. To charm was imagined as binding, tying the victim or the danger fast with the right words, so the vocabulary of joining supplied the vocabulary of spellcraft. A reader needs a different English word for it, though, because the point is enchantment, not partnership.