hagorah

BDB, HALOT, DCH, and TWOT all treat the masculine and feminine noun forms of this word as one lexical item built on the verb meaning to gird, and none assigns the feminine form a distinct sense; the feminine form is simply attested more often and across a slightly wider range of contexts. Scholars distinguish this word most clearly from a neighboring belt term, אזור, which several older studies (Cheyne, Kennedy, Robertson Smith, followed by BDB and the Anchor Bible Dictionary entry on dress) treat as the inner waist cloth worn next to the skin, while this word denotes the outer belt, often a soldier's, sometimes holding a weapon. Commentators on individual passages generally agree on which sense fits each verse: McCarter, Anderson, Hertzberg, and Alter read the belt in 2 Samuel 18:11 as an honorific reward; Cogan reads the belt in 1 Kings 2:5 as the same functional sword belt that appears in 2 Samuel 20:8, its stains serving as evidence of Joab's bloodguilt; Cogan and Tadmor, and Hobbs, read the idiom in 2 Kings 3:21 as meaning everyone of military age; and Blenkinsopp, Williamson, Oswalt, Childs, and Kaiser agree that Isaiah 3:24 names an ornate sash worn by upper class women, disputing only the meaning of a different word in the same verse. On the wider Semitic background, Lipinski and Huehnergard treat the root as a Northwest Semitic development from a broader sense of enclosing or restricting, since Akkadian uses an unrelated word (nebehu) for a belt, and Ugaritic prefers a different verb altogether.