lappid

At its core this word names a physical object: a portable torch, a shaft topped with a cup of oil-soaked wick that a person carries and holds up. Every use keeps that burning object in view, which is why it can be hidden inside a clay jar and smashed open in battle, thrust into a pile of cut grain, or seen passing between the pieces of a covenant sacrifice.

From that solid center the word reaches outward. Because a lit torch is the most vivid handheld brightness people knew, writers use it as a picture for anything that blazes or gleams:

• a rescued city's salvation shining out
• fire flaring from a monster's mouth
• eyes that burn
• the dazzle of polished war chariots on the move

In these places the torch is a comparison, not an object actually present.

At the far edge the picture finally tips over into the sky itself. When the people at Mount Sinai see thunder and flashes together, the word names lightning. This is the one place where it leaves the handheld object entirely. Hebrew has a separate, ordinary word for lightning (ברק), and the biblical writers usually keep the two apart, even using both in the same verse, so this lightning sense is a stretch of the torch-image rather than the word's home meaning.

The range runs along one line: from a real torch you can grip, to a torch used as a figure of speech for brilliance, to the flash of lightning. The physical object stays in view until that last step.