a statute: a fixed, prescribed regulation laid down to be kept, whether a binding law, a permanent religious observance, an inherited custom, or one of the set orders of nature
At its core this word names something that has been set in place and is meant to hold: a rule, an arrangement, an established order. The picture behind it is a thing engraved or appointed once and then standing fixed, not changing with mood or circumstance.
That one idea fans out across several settings. Most often it is a law God lays down for his people, named again and again alongside his judgments as the body of rules Israel is to keep. A large group of these are ritual rules marked as permanent: the recurring phrase "a lasting ordinance" fixes a feast, an offering, or a priestly duty as standing practice for every generation, the way Passover or the Day of Atonement was meant to be observed forever.
The same word can also describe what people have simply always done, an inherited custom or way of life, and the Bible uses it pointedly for the practices of the surrounding nations that Israel was warned not to copy. At the far reach of its range it names the set orders built into creation itself: the fixed appointments of sun, moon, and stars, the bounds of the sea, the laws of the heavens, treated as God's standing decrees just as much as the rules given at Sinai.
What ties all of this together is permanence and appointment. Whether the order is moral, ritual, customary, or cosmic, it is presented as something settled and prescribed rather than improvised, which is why the same word reaches from temple regulation to the courses of the stars.