to sit, to dwell, or to stay: to settle into a fixed place and remain there, whether for a moment, a lifetime, or a reign.
One simple picture holds all the uses of this word together: a person or people coming to rest in one place and staying there. From that single picture the word fans out in three directions, all close cousins. It can be a body settling onto a seat, the everyday act of sitting down. It can be a household or a nation settling onto land, the act of living somewhere and calling it home. And it can be the act of simply staying put, remaining where one is instead of moving on.
Which of these a verse means is decided almost entirely by context, not by any change in the word itself. The same form that says a man sat at a gate can say a tribe lived in the hill country, or that a guest stayed a few more days. This is why English Bibles render it with a whole shelf of words (sit, dwell, live, stay, remain, abide, inhabit) while the Hebrew keeps using the one verb.
Two special uses grow out of the plain sit. When the one sitting is a king on his throne, sitting becomes reigning, holding settled power, and Hebrew uses the same ordinary verb of God ruling from heaven. The form that means the one sitting in a land becomes the standard Hebrew way to say the inhabitants, the people who live there. In its causative use the word turns outward: to make someone sit, to give them a place, to settle a people on land or resettle them after exile.