karat

The word's most concrete use is simple cutting: felling a tree, trimming a branch, severing a head, cutting a cord. The object is always something that can be physically divided, and the context makes plain that a sharp instrument is at work.

This physical sense runs from the mundane (cutting wood for siege works or to heat an idol's forge) to the ceremonially charged (Zipporah's urgent cutting of her son's foreskin, the animals dismembered in covenant rites). It is also the semantic root that makes the other senses coherent: to cut off a person is to do to them what an ax does to a tree, and to make a covenant is to cut the sacrificial animals that seal it.

From the physical act of cutting, the word extends to the total removal of a person or group. Someone cut off in this sense is gone: dead, expelled, or stripped of any future place among the people. The imagery is always final.

Two distinct situations call for this language. The first is the karet penalty, a judicial or divine exclusion in which a person who violates a core prohibition is cut off from their people. The text never specifies the exact mechanism of karet (death? expulsion? divine deprivation of descendants?), and interpreters have long debated it, but the formula is consistent and recognizable: the offender is cut off from his people, or from Israel, or from the congregation. The Pentateuch applies this penalty to a specific list of violations: eating blood, failing to be circumcised, breaking the Passover, working on the Day of Atonement, and others.

The second situation is active destruction: a military enemy, a dynasty, a nation, a wicked class of people, or even idols are cut off by a human army or by divine judgment. The prophets use this with great force, and God often speaks in the first person: I will cut off. When the same construction is negated (shall not be cut off), it becomes a promise of continuity, of a dynasty or a name or a people that will not perish.

The most theologically important use of this word is also the most idiomatically fixed: to cut a covenant (כָּרַת בְּרִית). In the ancient Near East, covenants were typically ratified by slaughtering animals and passing between the severed halves, a rite that made the cutting act itself the formal seal of the agreement. The expression draws on this background so completely that the idiom became standard: the verb for cutting is simply the verb for covenant-making.

The range of covenants sealed this way spans the entire biblical story: the covenant with Abraham at the smoking fire-pot and flaming torch (Gen 15), the covenants at Sinai (Exod 24), the Mosaic covenant on the plains of Moab (Deut 29), the Davidic covenant of steadfast love (Ps 89, 2 Sam 7), covenants of peace (Ezek 34, 37), covenants between private individuals (Gen 21, 26, 31), and political treaties between kings (1 Sam 18, 2 Sam 5, 1 Kgs 5, 20). The word is used equally of human parties making agreements with each other and of God initiating a covenant with his people.

The idiom can appear without ברית when the covenant object is implied or named differently, as in Job 31:1 (a covenant with his own eyes), Isa 28:15 (a boasted covenant with death), or Hos 10:4 (cutting oaths). It also surfaces in prohibitions against making covenants with the nations or their gods (Exod 23:32, Deut 7:2).