to do violence: to handle a person or thing with ruthless force, wronging them or stripping them bare
This is the verb behind the far more familiar noun "violence" (חָמָס). It turns up only eight times, and never for force in general: it always names force used where it had no right to be used, so the act is condemned in the very naming of it.
The eight places show how wide that is:
- a king is warned never to treat the foreigner, the orphan or the widow this way
- priests are charged with manhandling God's teaching, forcing it to say what suits them
- a vine loses its unripe grapes, torn off long before their time
- God himself is said to tear down the shelter he had put up in Zion
- a shamed city is left stripped and exposed for everyone to see
What holds these together is not the kind of object but the kind of treatment: something that should have been left whole, honored, or protected is instead seized, torn, or crushed. That is what sets this word apart from its neighbors. Stealing in secret (גָּנַב) is about concealment, and grabbing property in broad daylight (גָּזַל) is about what changes hands; this word puts the weight on the brutality of the handling itself.
The strangest turn comes in Proverbs 8:36, where the violence rebounds on the one who does it: the person who will not have wisdom is said to do this to his own life. It is the same ruthless force, aimed inward.