to grow faint: to have one's strength give out, whether from hard effort, hunger, or a long pursuit
This word is about strength running out. It is not the tiredness of a long day or the boredom of a dull one, but the point at which the body has nothing left to give. A metalworker who has gone without food and water and cannot swing his hammer again has reached it. So has a young man who has run further than his legs will carry him.
It travels almost everywhere with a partner word for toiling (יָגַע), and between them the two cover the whole of exhaustion: one names the hard work, the other names the strength that work uses up. Isaiah 40 sets them side by side, first to say that the God who made the ends of the earth never comes to that point, and then to promise that people who wait for him will run and not reach it either.
The prophets also use it for effort poured into nothing. When Jeremiah and Habakkuk say that nations wear themselves out for fire and for emptiness, the word carries both the exertion and its worthlessness at once: everything the workers had was spent, and there is nothing standing at the end of it.
One use stands apart. In Daniel the word describes the messenger Gabriel as he reaches the praying prophet, paired with a matching noun for weariness (יְעָף). Readers have long taken the phrase two ways, either as the exhaustion of great speed or simply as swift flight, and English Bibles still divide over it.
Nuances
Whether the phrase describing Gabriel in Daniel 9:21 comes from this word for growing weary or from the separate verb meaning to fly.
- majorityThe two words come from this root for weariness, so the phrase describes the messenger as worn out by the speed of his coming, which most versions render as swift flight.; BDB, s.v. יָעֵף; HALOT, s.v. יעף; Collins, Daniel (Hermeneia), on 9:21
- minorityThe participle should instead be read as a form of the verb meaning to fly, giving simply a messenger flying swiftly.; BDB, s.v. יָעֵף (recording the proposed reading מְעוֹפֵף from עוף)