laḥam

The dominant sense of this verb is armed conflict between people, armies, or nations. It covers everything from a skirmish between two fighters to a full-scale campaign in which one kingdom besieges another. The word is relentlessly concrete: it describes the act of fighting, not the cause or the outcome.

A notable theological use runs through Deuteronomy, Joshua, and the Psalms: Yahweh is said to fight (or to fight on behalf of his people), using the same word applied to armies. This is not a separate sense but the same combat vocabulary applied with a different subject. When Moses says "the LORD your God is the one who fights for you" (Deuteronomy 3:22), or when Jeremiah says "I will fight against you" on behalf of the Babylonians (Jeremiah 21:5), the verb carries identical weight. The divine and human uses share the same core meaning.

The word is almost always used in a form that frames the fighting as something two sides do to each other, which captures the sense of being engaged in combat, entering a fight, rather than merely striking a blow.

In a small cluster of places in Proverbs and Psalms this verb means eating or consuming. Proverbs uses it repeatedly in instructions about table manners and the character of one's hosts: sitting to eat, eating at the table of a ruler, eating the bread of the wicked. Psalm 141:4 uses it to ask God not to let the speaker eat of the feasts of evildoers. Deuteronomy 32:24 uses a related form to mean "consumed" or "devoured" by plague.

This meaning is a genuinely different word that merely happens to be spelled the same, not a stretched or figurative use of the fighting sense. The two are built from the same three consonants, the same ones that also spell the common Hebrew noun for "bread," but they developed as separate words. Standard lexicons (HALOT, BDB) treat them as two roots. The eating sense and the fighting sense even tend to take different verb forms, which reinforces the conclusion that these are two distinct words.