to cause someone grief: to lay sorrow on a person, or to be the one bowed under sorrow that someone else has laid on them
Hebrew could have used this verb to mean simply "to feel sad," but it never does. Every one of its eight appearances involves an agent: either someone is laying grief on another person, or a person is carrying grief that was laid on them. The sorrow always arrives from outside. It is never chosen, and it is never merely a mood.
Who does the inflicting changes from book to book:
- the LORD, who lays sorrow on Jerusalem for her many rebellions (Lamentations 1:5; 1:12)
- friends who wear a suffering man down with their arguments (Job 19:2)
- foreign oppressors who told Israel to lie down so they could walk across her back (Isaiah 51:23)
Five of the eight appearances are in Lamentations, and the book uses this word to say the hardest thing it has to say: the disaster came from God, deliberately. Yet the same book refuses to leave that alone. He brings this grief "but he will have compassion" (Lamentations 3:32), and he does not do it willingly, out of his own heart (Lamentations 3:33), where the poet sets this verb beside the broader word for bringing someone low (עָנָה) in a single line.
Twice the word simply names people as grieving rather than as grieving someone: the young women of Jerusalem, standing next to her priests who groan (אָנַח) in Lamentations 1:4, and those who have lost the festivals they used to keep in Zephaniah 3:18. It is the same inflicted sorrow, seen from underneath. The noun built from this verb, יָגוֹן, names that sorrow itself: the deep, wearing grief of the heart.
Nuances
Whether the participle at the head of Zephaniah 3:18 comes from this verb, naming those who grieve because the appointed festivals have ceased, or from the homographic verb meaning to thrust away, naming those driven off from the festival, given that the whole clause is widely judged textually damaged.
- majorityThe form belongs to this verb: the Niphal participle of יגה I, so the phrase names those grieved over the appointed festival. The standard lexica list the occurrence here without hesitation, and the ū vocalization of נוּגֵי matches the Niphal participle of this root at Lamentations 1:4.; BDB, 387, s.v. I. יגה; HALOT, s.v. יגה I; David J. A. Clines (ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. IV (Sheffield, 1998), s.v. יגה
- minorityThe clause נוּגֵי מִמּוֹעֵד אָסַפְתִּי מִמֵּךְ cannot be construed with confidence as it stands, so any rendering rests on a reconstruction of the text and the participle's function here is not secure.; J. J. M. Roberts, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, Old Testament Library (Westminster John Knox, 1991), ad Zephaniah 3:18; Adele Berlin, Zephaniah, Anchor Bible 25A (Doubleday, 1994), ad 3:18