kaph

The starting point of this word is the hollow, curved inside of the hand. It is not the hand as a whole (that is a different word) but the cupped palm, the part that closes around what it holds, scoops up water or grain, claps in joy, or opens upward toward God.

Because the palm is where you take hold of things and where you give them away, it carries a string of common expressions. Something can be put into the palm of a person, meaning handed over into their control, and a person can be rescued out of the palm of an enemy, meaning out of their grip. To strike one palm against the other is to applaud or, in some settings, to mock. To spread out or lift the palms is the standard picture of someone praying.

From this same open, cupped shape the word reaches out to other hollow, curved things: the sole of the foot, the socket of the hip, the pouch of a sling, the bowl of a spoon or pan, even the curved fronds of a palm tree. The thread that ties them all together is not the hand as such but the shape of a hollow, curving surface.

This is the same cupped shape carried down to the foot. Just as the palm is the hollow inside of the hand, the sole is the hollow underside of the foot, the part that presses on the ground. The word is regularly paired with a word for foot to make the meaning clear, but the focus is on that one curved surface, not the whole foot.

It turns up most often in a vivid promise about land: every place the sole of your foot treads on will be yours. To set the sole of the foot somewhere is to take possession of it by walking it. It also names the bare, tender underside that gets no rest, as when there was no place for the sole of Noah's dove to settle, or when the priests' soles touched the water of the Jordan and it stood still.

In the account of Jacob wrestling through the night, the word names the hollow socket of his hip joint, the curved pocket where the top of the thigh bone sits. It is the same idea of a cupped, curving surface applied to the body's joint.

The word appears in this sense only in that story, tied to the moment the socket is wrenched and Jacob is left limping. It is a precise physical word for the rounded joint, not a general word for the hip or thigh.

This is the cupped shape applied to a sling. The hollow pocket of a sling, the part that holds the stone before it is hurled, is called by the same word used for the palm.

It appears in Abigail's promise to David that his life will be kept safe, while his enemies' lives will be flung away as from the hollow of a sling. The image works precisely because the word already means a small, cradling hollow.

The same cupped shape names a hollow vessel. A shallow bowl or pan, small enough to hold in the hand, is called by this word, and in the Bible it is almost always one of the gold dishes used in the worship of the tabernacle and temple.

The long lists of offerings in Numbers count out these gold pans full of incense, one for each tribe's leader. The vessels made for the tabernacle and later carried off when the temple was looted are named with the same word. The point is the shape: a small, shallow, hollow dish, like a deeper version of a cupped palm.

Once the word is stretched to the curving fronds of a tree. In the command to gather branches for the festival booths, the curved leafy sprays, including palm fronds, are called by this word.

This is the most distant use from the palm of the hand, and it is rare. It works by the same picture of something curved and reaching out, and it is no accident that the palm tree's spreading leaves and the human palm are linked in the imagination of the language.

In its one appearance outside the body, the word names a fitting on a door's bolt rather than any part of a person. The picture is the same small, cupped, hand-shaped curve that runs through this word's other uses, here applied to the knob a hand closes around to draw the bolt.

The woman recalls myrrh running from her fingers onto this part of the bolt as she rises to open the door for her beloved. Most lexicons and translations take it as the handle or knob gripped to work the bolt; a minority reads the same phrase as the bolt's socket or hinge instead. Either way it is this word's familiar hollow, curved shape, now lent to a piece of household hardware.