kanas

HALOT, BDB and DCH all treat כנס as a single verb meaning to gather or collect, with no homonym and no subdivision of the root; BDB marks it as late Hebrew, and the corpus distribution bears that out, since the eleven occurrences sit in Chronicles, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, Ezekiel and two psalms rather than in the older narrative and legal material, where אסף and קבץ do this work. The qal and piel are not semantically distinguished in the lexica: both simply gather, whether the object is goods (Ecclesiastes 2:8, 2:26, 3:5; Nehemiah 12:44), water (Psalm 33:7), or people (1 Chronicles 22:2; Esther 4:16; Ezekiel 22:21, 39:28; Psalm 147:2). The single hithpael, in Isaiah 28:20, is glossed by BDB as gather oneself, that is, wrap oneself, and by HALOT as to wrap oneself up; Wildberger reads the proverb as a pair of images of inadequate provision, the bed too short and the covering too narrow, and the verb's reflexive force is inferred from that context alone. Zimmerli takes the gathering of Ezekiel 22:19-21 as part of the smelting figure, the guilty collected into the crucible of Jerusalem, and notes that the same verb in 39:28 serves the opposite movement, the return of the exiles; Kraus reads Psalm 147:2 within the same restoration vocabulary. On Psalm 33:7 the Masoretic כַּנֵּד, as a heap, has a well-known variant כְּנֹאד, as a wineskin, reflected in the Greek and Syriac and discussed in the critical commentaries, which changes the picture of the gathered water but not the sense of the verb. Seow notes the late Hebrew and Aramaic colouring of the Ecclesiastes vocabulary, and the Aramaic cognate כנש appears in Daniel 3. In rabbinic Hebrew the root yields כְּנֶסֶת, an assembly, and בֵּית הַכְּנֶסֶת, the house of assembly or synagogue, as Jastrow documents; that development is post-biblical and should not be read back into the biblical occurrences.