to draw off or pull out: to slip something free of what holds it
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong
At its most concrete this word is about extraction: pulling a thing loose from the place that grips it. A sandal is drawn off a foot, diseased stones are pried out of a wall, an animal draws out its teat to nurse its young. The shared picture is a firm, deliberate removal, not a casual setting-aside.
The most famous case is the sandal ceremony for a man who refuses to marry his dead brother's widow: she draws his sandal off his foot in front of the elders, and his family is forever called the house of the unsandalled. Here the act of pulling the sandal free becomes a public sign of duty refused.
From this same idea of pulling free comes a figurative use: a person or a god can withdraw, that is, draw himself away from others. When the prophet says the LORD has drawn off from a faithless people, it is the same motion of extraction turned inward, a deliberate pulling-back of presence.
Nuances
1ato draw off a sandal from the foot
Deu 25:9Deu 25:10Isa 20:2
1bto pull out or pry loose an object lodged in place
Lev 14:40Lev 14:43Lam 4:3*
1cto withdraw oneself, to draw away from someone
Hos 5:6
2
to equip for war: to make ready and go out as an armed force
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong
This is the language of mustering for battle. Most often it appears as a word picture for the soldier himself, the equipped man, the one made ready and sent ahead of the people to fight. The tribes that settled east of the Jordan promised to cross over ready for war, marching armed in front of their fellow Israelites until the land was won.
The action form of the word means to ready oneself for the fight, to gird up and go out for the campaign. Whether it names the armed man or the act of arming, the setting is the same: men called from among the people, equipped, and drawn up for war.
Scholars debate whether this is truly a separate word from the one meaning to draw off, or the same root seen from another angle, since girding the loins for battle could be pictured as a kind of drawing-up. Either way, in actual use the war sense stands clearly on its own.
Nuances
2aarmed, equipped for war (the ready soldier or armed force)
to rescue: to pull someone out of danger or distress into safety
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong
This is the word of deliverance in the Psalms. It keeps the basic picture of drawing something out, but now what is drawn out is a person in trouble: God reaches into the trap, the sickbed, the narrow place, and pulls the sufferer free into open ground. The prayer "rescue me" and the testimony "he brought me out" both use it.
The vivid line that the angel of the LORD camps around those who fear him and rescues them captures the heart of the sense: not merely keeping someone safe at a distance but actively extracting them from harm. In wisdom sayings the righteous are likewise pulled clear of the trouble that swallows the wicked.
A single difficult case promises that God will make a person's bones strong, or refresh them. Read as rescue, it is deliverance from weakness into vigor; some scholars instead connect it to a separate idea of strengthening. It is grouped here with rescue because the surrounding promise is one of renewal and relief.
Nuances
3ato pull someone out of danger into safety; to deliver
Its commonest use is rescue: God pulls a person out of danger, sickness, or the grip of enemies and sets them somewhere safe. The other word is never used for saving a person this way.Psa 6:4Psa 34:7Psa 50:15Psa 116:8Job 36:152Sa 22:20Pro 11:8
It is also the standard word for men picked out of the wider population and fitted out for battle, so it settles into the sense "armed" or "ready for war" and works as a label for the fighting force itself.Num 32:17Jos 4:13Jos 6:7Isa 15:4
It can mean pulling a damaged piece out of a larger whole and throwing it away, as when the priest has the infected stones taken out of a house wall.Lev 14:40Lev 14:43
Both
Both are used for getting a sandal off a foot, and that is where their ranges genuinely overlap: the widow pulling the sandal off her brother in law, the prophet told to go barefoot, Moses and Joshua ordered to take their sandals off on holy ground.Deu 25:9Isa 20:2Exo 3:5Jos 5:15
It covers something working loose and dropping away on its own, with nobody pulling at it: an axe head flying off its handle, olives falling before they ripen.Deu 19:5Deu 28:40
It is used for clearing a whole population out of the territory it holds, whether God dislodging nations ahead of Israel or a king pushing settlers out of a captured town. The other word is never used for emptying a land of its people.Deu 7:1Deu 7:222Ki 16:6
This is the word Israel prays when trouble closes in, and the word God answers back with. It runs through the Psalms as both the plea and the promise of rescue.Psa 6:4Psa 50:15Psa 91:15
It covers the plain act of pulling something off or out of the place it sits in, such as a sandal off a foot or diseased stones out of a house wall.Deu 25:9Lev 14:40Isa 20:2
It became the standard term for men drawn out from the tribes and equipped for battle, which is why English Bibles often render it "armed for war".Num 31:5Num 32:21Jos 4:13
It carries a moral pattern in the wisdom writings, where the person who lives rightly is pulled clear of the trouble that then falls on the wrongdoer instead.Pro 11:8Pro 11:9
Both
Both describe God setting free a person who cannot get free without him, and both show up in Israel's praise for exactly that.Psa 34:7Psa 116:8Psa 146:7Psa 105:20
Both begin as everyday physical actions, taking something off or undoing a knot, and both stretch that action into the language of rescue from real danger.Isa 20:2Psa 140:1Isa 58:6Psa 105:20
Its underlying picture is a sudden spring or leap: insects hopping along the ground, a heart jumping inside the chest at the sound of thunder, hills and nations startled into motion when God appears.Lev 11:21Job 37:1Hab 3:6
When it means freeing, the picture is specifically untying. Cords and bonds are undone, so that what was tied springs loose.Isa 58:6Job 6:9
It is the word for someone let out of confinement, whether a ruler orders a prisoner released or God himself opens the cell.Psa 105:20Psa 146:7
to rescue or deliver a person out of danger, distress, or death, most often with God as the one who pulls someone freePsa 6:4Psa 34:7Psa 50:15Psa 116:8
to be equipped and ready for battle, the armed men who go out before the armyNum 31:5Num 32:17Jos 4:13Jos 6:7
Both
both name the act of pulling a sandal off the foot in a legal ceremony that seals a matterDeu 25:9Rut 4:7
to draw a weapon, especially pulling a sword out of its sheath, and by extension the fighting men who draw the swordJdg 8:201Sa 17:51Num 22:232Sa 24:9
ḥalats in the other biblical languages
ῥύομαιGreek“to rescue”the main Greek verb for rescuing or delivering someone from danger; it carries the rescue sense but not the sandal or war-mustering senses
Used for pulling an object out of the place it is set, as when the priest orders the diseased stones taken out of a house wall and thrown away.Lev 14:40Lev 14:43
Used for stripping off what someone is wearing: a sandal pulled off a man's foot in front of witnesses, or clothing and sandals taken off at God's command as a walking sign.Deu 25:9Deu 25:10Isa 20:2
Pictures rescue as being drawn out into open ground, out of a tight and crushing place into room to stand and breathe.2Sa 22:20Psa 18:19
Is the standing word of prayer under pressure, the plea a psalmist keeps making when he asks God directly to pull him out.Psa 6:4Psa 119:153Psa 140:1
Both
Both begin from the plain act of taking something out of where it sits and then use that same picture for people: a stone pried out of a wall and an eye torn out are the same motion as a person pulled out of danger.Lev 14:40Mat 18:9
Both are words for God hauling his people out of the grip of a power stronger than they are. The Old Testament looks back with the Hebrew word on Israel answered and rescued in Egypt, and the New Testament tells that same rescue with the Greek word when Stephen retells the burning bush, and again when Peter says he was pulled out of Herod's hand.Psa 81:7Act 7:34Act 12:11
Both cover rescue from named human enemies who mean real harm, whether prayed for in advance or reported after the fact by the officer who got there in time.Psa 140:1Act 23:27
Both can describe God lifting someone out of trouble as an act of sheer favor toward the person he cares for, not as payment owed.Psa 34:7Job 36:15Act 7:10
Used for a drastic removal a person performs on their own body: Jesus tells the hearer to tear out an eye that keeps leading them into sin, treating the loss of a part as better than the ruin of the whole.Mat 5:29Mat 18:9
Stretches to rescue out of a whole hostile order rather than one crisis: Paul says Jesus gave himself to pull his people out of "the present evil age", a rescue from the era they live in and not merely from an enemy.Gal 1:4
Often names a rescue that comes with an errand attached, where God pulls someone out of danger precisely in order to send them somewhere.Act 7:34Act 26:17
What scholars say about ḥalats
The standard lexica treat the consonants חלץ as covering more than one root. BDB and HALOT distinguish חלץ I (to draw off, withdraw; the qal of the sandal and the stones, with the piel developing to deliver, rescue) from חלץ II (to equip for war, the qal passive participle חלוץ "armed" and the niphal "to gird oneself for battle"). Whether the war sense is etymologically the same root as drawing-off (via the image of girding the loins) or a genuinely separate homonym is discussed but unresolved; in usage the war range stands apart. The piel/niphal "deliver" usage is concentrated in the Psalms and is widely understood as a development of the drawing-out idea. Isaiah 58:11 (the hiphil with bones as object) is the one form whose sense is contested, read as strengthen/refresh or as deliver-from-weakness.
Where scholars disagree about ḥalats
Whether the consonants חלץ represent one polysemous root or two (or three) unrelated homonyms, in particular whether the war sense ("equip for battle") is the same root as the drawing-off sense.
majorityTwo distinct roots: חלץ I "draw off, withdraw" (with the derived "rescue" sense) and חלץ II "equip for war".; BDB, s.v. חָלַץ I, II; HALOT, s.v. חלץ
minorityA single root whose senses are connected through the image of girding the loins for battle, drawing off, and drawing out.; TDOT, vol. 4, s.v. חָלַץ