ḥalal

This is the most common use of the word and the one that carries the most weight in the Bible. Something or someone set apart for God (the Sabbath, the sanctuary, God's name, the priesthood, a person) is dragged back down to ordinary status, robbed of the special standing that made it holy. The opposite of this word is to keep something holy.

The word covers a wide spread of objects. People profane God's name when they swear falsely by it or live in a way that drags it through the mud. The Sabbath is profaned when it is worked like any other day. The sanctuary and its offerings are profaned when they are touched, used, or approached in ways that ignore their holiness. A priest could profane himself or his daughter. Even a person's own dignity or marriage bed can be profaned.

In one specific legal use, the word means to put a new vineyard to common use for the first time, that is, to enjoy its fruit after the years in which it was off limits. The idea is the same: what was held back from ordinary use is now brought into it.

This is the second most common use, and on the surface it looks unrelated to profaning. To begin a thing is to make the first move into it, often with the sense of breaking into something new. The Bible uses it for the start of an action, a building project, a journey, a plague, or an era of history.

Whether this is truly the same word as profane is an old question. One long-standing explanation links the two through the idea of breaking through a boundary: to profane is to break into the protected sphere of the holy, and to begin is to break into a new undertaking. Many scholars instead treat begin and profane as two separate words that happen to be spelled alike. Either way, in actual reading the begin sense is easy to tell apart from the profane sense by context.

A smaller group of poetic passages uses the word for piercing or wounding, the way a weapon runs a body through. It appears in pictures of God striking down the great chaos monster of the sea and in the suffering of a wounded heart. Its most famous use is the servant who was pierced for our transgressions.

This sense most likely reflects an older root meaning to bore through or pierce, which some scholars also see as the deeper origin behind profane (the holy is breached, broken into). Whether it is the same word or a look-alike, the picture here is concrete: something is run through and wounded.

In a couple of passages the word describes people playing on pipes in celebration. This goes with the noun for a pipe or flute and is the rarest sense, almost certainly a separate word from the others that happens to share the same spelling.