to tear apart and kill, the way a lion or wolf seizes prey and rips it to pieces
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled
At its core this word names one vivid picture: a predator bringing down its prey and ripping the body apart. It is not the gentle tearing of cloth or paper. It is the killing bite of a carnivore, and everywhere the word goes it carries that violence with it.
From that literal picture the word reaches out in two directions. It describes cruel and violent people, who fall on their victims the way a lion falls on a lamb, and it describes God striking his people or their enemies in judgment, again pictured as a lion that tears and drags off what it has caught. Even when Scripture uses it of God, the same brutal image stands behind it, which is what makes a verse like Hosea 6:1 so striking: the one who has torn is also the one who will heal.
Because the same act can be pictured as a strong tribe on the hunt or as a savage enemy on the attack, the word itself stays neutral about who is right. It simply describes the tearing; the surrounding text tells you whether to cheer or to grieve.
Nuances
1aa wild animal tears and kills its prey, ripping apart the creature it has caught (including prey or livestock found already torn)
1cGod strikes his people or their enemies in judgment, pictured as a lion that tears and carries off what it has seized
Job 16:9Psa 50:22Hos 5:14Hos 6:1
2
to provide someone with food, giving them the portion they need to eat
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintyStrong
In one place the word is turned around to mean feeding rather than tearing. The prayer of Proverbs 30:8 asks God to give the speaker the exact portion of bread he needs, neither poverty nor excess. The link to the predatory sense is the shared idea of a portion of food to devour: here the fierce image is softened into a request for daily provision from God's hand.
Is the killing rip of a predator's jaws and claws, mangling an animal or a person into flesh that cannot be put back together.Gen 37:33Gen 44:28Exo 22:13
Pictures a violent enemy as a ravening lion or wolf, seizing and shredding its victim while none can rescue.Psa 7:2Psa 17:12Ezk 22:27
Portrays the LORD himself as the attacking beast, tearing his people in wrath so that only he can heal what he has torn.Hos 5:14Hos 6:1Job 16:9
Both
Both can voice a decisive act of divine judgment in which God tears something away for good, leaving no one able to reverse it, though one pictures flesh seized by a predator and the other a kingdom stripped like a garment.Hos 5:141Ki 11:11
Is the ripping of cloth, splitting a garment or fabric along its seam so that it comes apart.Exo 28:32Lev 13:56Ecc 3:7
Names the ritual gesture of grief and dismay: a mourner rends his own clothes at news of death or disaster.Gen 37:342Sa 1:11Job 1:20
Becomes a prophetic sign-act in which a torn robe stands for a torn kingdom, the rule ripped away from a king and handed to another.1Sa 15:281Ki 11:311Ki 14:8
בָּלַעswallows a victim down whole and entire (the earth swallowing rebels, a great fish swallowing Jonah), where this word rips the prey to pieces first
Pictures a predator ripping its prey to pieces, leaving a mangled, bloodied carcass rather than a body swallowed whole. Jacob concludes a wild beast has torn Joseph limb from limb, and the lion is the standing image for it, tearing enough flesh to fill its den.Gen 37:33Gen 44:28Nam 2:12Ezk 19:3
Because the victim is torn open rather than engulfed, the aftermath is open wounds that can be bandaged: God says he has torn his people and will now heal them, and elsewhere he mauls them in his wrath like a beast.Hos 6:1Job 16:9
Both
Both serve as fierce metaphors for God turning destroyer against his own people in judgment, one by engulfing them and one by mauling them, so the terror is the same even though the manner of ruin differs.Lam 2:5Hos 5:14
Pictures a victim engulfed and gone whole, sucked down intact into a mouth, a belly, the earth, or the sea rather than mangled. The ground opens and swallows Korah and his company alive, and the sea swallows Pharaoh's army the same way, the victim vanishing in one gulp.Num 16:30Num 16:32Exo 15:12Psa 106:17
Because the thing swallowed goes down whole, it can still be inside the swallower and even brought back up unharmed. Jonah is gulped down alive by the fish, and Babylon is charged with swallowing its prey only to be forced to disgorge what it filled its belly with.Jon 1:17Jer 51:34
Used for one thing absorbing another so completely that the first simply disappears into it: in Pharaoh's dream the thin ears of grain swallow the plump ears, and Aaron's staff swallows the magicians' staffs.Gen 41:7Gen 41:24Exo 7:12
Names the violent ACT of seizing and ripping flesh, the verb of a predator at work. It is something a beast or attacker does to a victim.Gen 37:33Psa 22:13Hos 5:14
Can be turned into a picture of God striking and then healing, where the same word for ripping is used and then reversed, so the action itself is the focus.Hos 6:1Job 16:9
Used for an animal killed in the field that a hired keeper is not liable for, naming the event of the killing rather than the carcass left behind.Exo 22:13
Both
Both belong to the same scene of a beast killing its quarry, and prophets pair them together when they brand corrupt leaders as predators who seize and devour their own people.Ezk 22:27Ezk 22:25
Both appear in the lion imagery of a young lion learning to hunt, where the act of tearing produces the kill it then eats.Ezk 19:3Nam 2:12
Names the THING that has been torn: the meat a predator has caught, the kill it carries off and eats. It is an object you can drag away, devour, or set before young.Gen 49:9Job 4:11Amo 3:4
Stretches beyond a literal carcass to mean food or provision in general, the portion a hunter or householder brings home to feed dependents.Psa 111:5Pro 31:15Mal 3:10
Pictures a lion crouched over the kill it will not give up, the prize in the predator's grip rather than the motion of catching it.Isa 31:4Num 23:24
Keeps the attack itself in view, with a hunter doing the tearing: a lion crouching to rip its prey, Benjamin pictured as a wolf, beasts loose on a city.Psa 17:12Gen 49:27Jer 5:6
Reaches all the way to God as the one who tears. The prophets and psalms picture the LORD falling on his own people like a lion with no one able to rescue them, and his tearing can even be the wound he afterward heals.Hos 5:14Hos 6:1Psa 50:22
Describes human cruelty in the same predatory terms: prophets and rulers who tear their own people for gain, and a brother whose anger keeps on tearing.Ezk 22:25Ezk 22:27Amo 1:11
Can be spoken of a person as the one torn, where the concern is what happened to him and not what was left of the body. Jacob twice concludes that a wild animal has torn Joseph.Gen 37:33Gen 44:28
Carries one wholly peaceable use with no predator in it at all: asking God for the plain share of bread a person needs, neither poverty nor riches.Pro 30:8
Both
Both belong to one event, the seizing and ripping apart of an animal, so a single sentence can use one word for the tearing and the other for what the tearing left behind. Israel's law on a borrowed animal does exactly that: if the animal is torn, the borrower produces the torn remains as evidence and owes nothing.Exo 22:13
Both assume a violent, messy killing rather than an orderly one, which is why Nahum can describe a lion's den with one word for the hunting and the other for the flesh heaped inside it.Nam 2:12
Names a whole class of meat in Israel's rules for eating, always set beside an animal that simply died on its own, so that between them the two cover every death that was not a proper slaughter.Lev 22:8Ezk 44:31Lev 7:24
Raises the question of defilement, which the tearing itself never does. Eating it leaves a person unclean until evening, flesh found torn out in the open is fit only to be thrown to the dogs, and Ezekiel can point to never having eaten it as proof of a lifetime of clean eating.Lev 17:15Exo 22:31Ezk 4:14
Works as a concrete item in a reckoning between people, something a shepherd can be held answerable for. Jacob tells Laban he never brought him a torn animal but shouldered the loss himself.Gen 31:39
This is the predator's word: a wild animal seizes prey and rips it apart to kill it, and that same picture is turned onto violent people and onto God striking in judgment like a lion.Gen 37:33Ezk 22:27Hos 5:14
From the prey a predator secures, it can flip to the food itself, and so to providing someone the exact portion of food they need.Pro 30:8
Both
Both can picture tearing a victim to pieces like a lion, and in the single verse where they stand side by side they describe the very same attack: the enemy tearing the soul and ripping it apart with none to rescue.Psa 7:2
The core picture is wrenching an object loose from whatever holds it: gold earrings pulled off ears, a yoke snapped off the neck, mountains torn open by a violent wind.Exo 32:3Gen 27:401Ki 19:11
That same tearing-loose reaches all the way to rescue: to tear a person free from an enemy's grip, to deliver them out of a hostile hand.Psa 136:24Lam 5:8
taraph in the other biblical languages
ἁρπάζωGreek“to seize”the Greek verb for a predator or robber snatching prey away by force (the wolf that snatches the sheep), stressing the seizing and carrying off rather than the tearing of the body
Names the specific act of a wild animal ripping its prey apart, the lion or wolf tearing flesh.Gen 49:27Psa 22:13Ezk 19:3
Used of an animal mangling a person so badly that a torn body is the proof of death, leaving nothing to seize or carry off whole.Gen 37:33Gen 44:28Exo 22:13
Both
Both picture a predator carrying off its catch: the Greek word describes a wolf snatching and scattering the sheep, and the Hebrew word describes the lion tearing and dragging away its prey, so the New Testament image of the wolf overlaps the Old Testament image of the beast.Jhn 10:12Mic 5:8
Covers seizing of any kind, by people as well as animals: a strong man plundering a house, a mob about to grab Jesus, soldiers pulling Paul out of a riot.Mat 12:29Jhn 6:15Act 23:10
Can describe a sudden snatching away by God or his Spirit, including rescue and being caught up to heaven, so the seizing is not always hostile.Act 8:392Co 12:21Th 4:17
Pictures a protective grip from which no one can pull a person away, the safe-keeping side of seizing.Jhn 10:28Jhn 10:29
διασπάωGreek“to tear apart”the Greek verb for tearing something apart or limb from limb (a mob tearing a man, chains wrenched apart), the closest match for the physical rending, though without the hunting-and-prey overtone
Belongs to the world of the predator: a lion or wolf seizes and rends its prey, so the word often carries the sense of ravening.Gen 49:27Psa 7:2Mic 5:8
It can name a settled habit of mauling rather than a single act, as when God or an enemy keeps tearing a victim the way a beast does.Job 16:9Hos 6:1Amo 1:11
Both
Both describe a human body rent to pieces by violent force, whether a son thought devoured by a beast or a prisoner about to be pulled apart in a mob.Gen 37:33Act 23:10
Names a pulling apart under tension, where opposing forces wrench a body or object asunder rather than shredding it by bite or blade.Act 23:10
Its object can be an inanimate restraint and not only living flesh, as when iron chains are snapped apart by sheer strength.Mrk 5:4
What scholars say about taraph
The standard lexica (BDB, HALOT, DCH) treat טרף as a single root meaning to tear, rend, especially of a wild beast tearing prey, in the qal, with the niphal and pual used for prey that is torn (of Joseph in Genesis 37:33 and 44:28, and of livestock in Exodus 22:13). The related noun טֶרֶף (H2964), prey or torn flesh, and טְרֵפָה, an animal torn by beasts, come from the same root and confirm the predatory core. The figurative extensions to violent men (Psalm 7:2; 22:13; Ezekiel 22:25, 27) and to God as a tearing lion (Hosea 5:14; 6:1; Job 16:9;Psalm 50:22) are widely recognized and uncontested. The lone hiphil in Proverbs 30:8, הַטְרִיפֵנִי, is a causative extension rendered feed me or provide me and understood as giving one a portion to eat; the lexica note the semantic distance from the tearing sense but agree on the meaning. On the whole the sense of the word is not in dispute.