yatsa

This is the plain, everyday meaning of the word: leaving an enclosed or interior place for the open. A person walks out of a house, a city, or a tent; an army marches out to fight; a child comes forth from the womb. The same picture stretches naturally to anything that emerges from a source. The sun comes up over the horizon, water flows out of a spring, a shoot springs from a stump, a boundary line runs out from a fixed point across the land, and words come out of a mouth.

What holds all of these together is the direction of the movement, not the thing that moves. Something that was contained, hidden, or fixed in place now passes to the outside and becomes visible or active. Hebrew uses this one verb where English reaches for a whole shelf of words: go out, come out, come forth, depart, proceed, rise.

Because the focus is on crossing from inside to outside, the word is the natural opposite of בּוֹא, the verb for going in or coming in, and the two are often paired to sum up the whole of a person's activity, their going out and coming in.

The law also gives the verb one fixed legal turn: a bound servant who has finished his term is said to "go out," meaning to leave service as a free person.

When the same verb is built in its causative form, the subject no longer leaves a place but makes someone or something else leave it. A man brings his guests out of the house; a priest carries the ashes out of the camp; the ground sends forth its plants. The movement from inside to outside is the same, but now there is an agent who causes it.

Far and away the most important use of this meaning is God bringing Israel out of Egypt. The line "who brought you out of the land of Egypt" becomes a fixed title for the LORD and the ground of his claim on Israel. It opens the Ten Commandments and recurs through the law, the Psalms, and the prophets as the defining act of rescue: God reached into slavery and led a people out into freedom.

The causative also covers ordinary acts of producing or yielding: a land bringing forth its crops, a person drawing money or goods out of storage, speech that one puts out into the world.