to blaze: to burn with open flame, and so to set something alight or burn it to nothing
The picture behind this word is an open flame: something leaping, bright, and fast, not a slow smolder or a dull heat. Almost every time it appears, the words "fire" or "flame" stand right beside it, and this verb says what that fire is doing. Sometimes it simply means being alight, as in Psalm 104:4, where God's servants are called a blazing fire. Once it means putting fuel to the torch: Leviathan's breath sets coals glowing in Job 41:21.
Most often, though, the flame has swept through something and left nothing behind. Eight of its eleven appearances describe fire eating up a target: the foundations of the mountains, the trees of a scorched countryside, the wicked in the wilderness, the enemies who stand in God's path. In every one of those the fire belongs to God, either as his anger or as the day of his judgment, so the word carries an association with divine punishment that a general word for burning does not.
It is worth hearing alongside its neighbors:
- The everyday verb for a fire being alight (בָּעַר) is the broad, ordinary term, and it also stretches to mean clearing something out or sweeping it away.
- The verb for burning something up (שָׂרַף) is what a person does deliberately with a torch, to a body, a city, or an offering.
- The verb for eating (אָכַל) is the poets' favorite partner for this one, so that fire devours on one line and blazes on the next.
This word sits between them. It is not what a person does to something, and it is not the plain fact that a fire is lit. It is what the flame itself does when it goes through what is in its way.