to provide for and keep someone alive: to supply food and support so a person or people can survive.
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled
This is the everyday sense of the word, and it is about survival, not comfort. To do this for someone is to take responsibility for keeping them fed and cared for, usually through a stretch of hardship like a famine, exile, or old age. Joseph does it for his father and brothers in Egypt; ravens and a widow do it for Elijah; officers do it for Solomon's household; God does it for Israel in the wilderness.
Because the word names ongoing responsibility rather than a single handout, it often carries the warmth of a protector who will not let those in his charge go under. When the Bible says God does this for the person who trusts him, it means he holds them up and keeps them from collapse, the way a provider keeps dependents alive when they cannot fend for themselves.
The same word can be turned negative to expose a false provider: the worthless shepherd who refuses to do it, leaving the flock to starve while he feeds himself.
Nuances
1ato supply food and the necessities of life to people, keeping them alive through hardship.
1bto hold a person up and keep them from collapse (of God, or of a person's own inner strength).
Psa 55:22(23)Psa 112:5*Pro 18:14*
1cto refuse to provide for and protect those in one's charge (the failed provider).
Zec 11:16
2
to contain or hold a quantity: to have room enough to keep something inside.
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled
Here the word is about capacity. A vessel or a space either has room for what you want to put in it or it does not. The great bronze basin in Solomon's temple holds thousands of gallons of water; the courtyard is too small to hold all the offerings; broken pits cannot keep the rainwater from leaking away.
The most striking use turns this ordinary question of room into a statement about God. If the highest heavens cannot hold him, then no temple built by human hands ever could. The word keeps its plain meaning, but the picture it paints is that God overflows every container the world can offer.
Nuances
2aof a vessel or space: to have room for a measured amount of something.
1Ki 7:261Ki 7:381Ki 8:642Ch 4:52Ch 7:7Jer 2:13*
2bof God: to be too great for any space to contain him.
1Ki 8:272Ch 2:6(5)2Ch 6:18
3
to bear up under something overwhelming: to be able to endure or withstand it.
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong
This meaning takes the idea of holding and turns it inward, from a jar with room inside to a person with the strength to take the strain. The question it usually raises is whether anyone can stand it. Who can endure the day the LORD comes? Who can bear his fury? The expected answer is almost always no one.
Because the word so often appears with a can or cannot, it tends to measure human weakness against something too heavy to be borne: God's anger, his coming judgment, even the weight of a prophet's own words on the people who hear them. The prophet Jeremiah uses it of himself, worn out from holding God's message inside until he could no longer keep it in.
Nuances
3ato endure or withstand an overwhelming force, most often God's anger or coming judgment.
Jer 10:10Ezk 21:28(33)Ezk 23:32Jol 2:11Amo 7:10*Mal 3:2
3bto hold something in until one can no longer contain it.
Jer 6:11*Jer 20:9
4
to measure out a quantity: to gauge how much something amounts to.
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong
This meaning appears only once, in a famous poem about how vast God is. The picture is of someone measuring the dust of the earth by the scoopful, weighing the mountains, taking the true measure of things no one could actually measure. It belongs to the same family of ideas as containing and holding, since to measure something is to fit it into a set amount, but here the focus is on gauging the size rather than having room for it.
reaches beyond food to any kind of holding up: a vessel having room enough to hold what is poured into it, or a person bearing up under a weight that would crush them.1Ki 7:26Jer 20:9
keeps the focus on the act of supplying and keeping alive, without picturing the one who does it as a herdsman with a flock.Gen 45:11Gen 50:21
Both
both describe feeding and providing for dependents so they stay alive, and the two meet when a shepherd fails to nourish the flock he was meant to keep.Gen 47:12Zec 11:16Psa 23:1
names the whole work of a herdsman: leading animals out to pasture, watching over them, and bringing them home, not only feeding them.Gen 37:21Sa 16:11
carries a rich picture of leadership: a king or God caring for a people the way a shepherd cares for the flock.2Sa 5:2Psa 23:1
It is the word for how much something can hold. A basin holds two thousand baths, a cracked cistern holds no water at all, and even the highest heavens cannot hold God.1Ki 7:26Jer 2:131Ki 8:27
It covers bearing up under something almost unbearable: a day of judgment nobody can stand through, words a country cannot put up with, a sickness a person's own spirit has to carry him through.Mal 3:2Amo 7:10Pro 18:14
It describes provisioning that runs for months or years, an ongoing arrangement rather than a single act: Joseph feeding his whole family through the famine, officers each supplying the royal household for a month of the year, Obadiah keeping a hundred hidden prophets in bread and water.Gen 47:121Ki 4:71Ki 18:4
Both
Both are used for keeping a person alive by supplying food.Gen 45:11Gen 18:5
Both describe God holding a person up so that he does not collapse under what he is carrying.Psa 55:22Psa 94:18
Both can be answered with the plain English word "sustain", which is why English Bibles blur them: one keeps a person supplied, the other keeps a person propped up.Neh 9:21Psa 41:3
It is the word for catching someone at the moment their footing goes, the hand that steadies a person who is already slipping.Psa 94:18Psa 119:117Psa 18:35
It is the standard phrase for one meal that revives a traveler on the spot, offered as hospitality: a bite of bread to steady the heart before the journey resumes.Gen 18:5Jdg 19:51Ki 13:7
It is used of what keeps a throne or a kingdom standing, the loyalty and justice underneath a reign that hold it in place.Pro 20:28Isa 9:7
kul in the other biblical languages
τρέφωGreek“to feed”the Greek verb for nourishing or feeding, which covers the providing-for-life side of this word but not its senses of containing or enduring.
Reaches beyond food to holding or containing: a vessel or a space having room for what it takes in.1Ki 7:261Ki 8:27
Also means to bear up under or withstand something overwhelming, as in enduring a fearful day or holding in a hard word.Mal 3:2Jer 20:9
Both
Both name the ongoing work of providing food and support to keep someone alive, and the Greek word often carries the same idea of sustenance the Hebrew word does.Gen 45:11Mat 6:26
Names the concrete act of feeding a living creature to keep it alive, whether birds, animals, or people.Mat 6:26Luk 12:24
Reaches into raising and rearing: bringing a child up from infancy, including nursing at the breast.Luk 4:16Luk 23:29
Can carry the darker shade of fattening, feeding richly to the point of self-indulgence.Jas 5:5
χωρέωGreek“to make room for”the Greek verb for having room for or making room, which matches the containing side of this word but not its providing or enduring senses.
Beyond helping people, the Hebrew word means to hold or contain, as a great basin holds water, or in the claim that heaven itself cannot contain God. The Greek word never carries this sense of physical capacity.1Ki 7:261Ki 8:27
It also means to endure or withstand: who can bear the day of the Lord's coming, or a wounded spirit that no one can hold up. This idea of standing firm under pressure is absent from the Greek word.Mal 3:2Pro 18:14
Both
Both words describe sustaining a person in need, providing the food and support that keeps them alive. The Hebrew word covers this broadly, from Joseph feeding his family through famine to a widow feeding the prophet Elijah, and the Greek word overlaps right here, in the church relieving its widows.Gen 47:121Ki 17:91Ti 5:161Ti 5:10
The Greek word means only to come to another's aid, giving relief to people in genuine distress. It names a deliberate act of mercy toward the afflicted and toward widows, part of the community's duty to care for its own.1Ti 5:101Ti 5:16
What scholars say about kul
The lexica treat kwl as a single root whose core notion is comprehending or holding, realized in three principal senses: the piel "to sustain, provide for, maintain" (the largest group), the hiphil "to contain, hold" (of vessels and space), and a closely related "to endure, bear" (able to hold up under). BDB and HALOT keep "contain/hold" and "endure/bear" adjacent, and some analyses treat them as one figurative continuum rather than two meanings; the split here follows the distinct English concepts required (a container's capacity versus a person's endurance). The single qal in Isaiah 40:12 ("measure out") is classified variously as its own nuance or as an extension of the holding sense. Isaiah 40:12's qal and the general derivation are discussed in the theological dictionaries, but no live dispute attaches to the word's core meaning.
Sources
BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. כולlexicon
HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. כולlexicon
DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. כולlexicon
G. J. Botterweck, "כול kul," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT) 7:88-91dictionary