laqaq

This is the word for an animal's way of drinking. It always involves a tongue and a liquid taken up directly, with no cup and no cupped hands: water at a stream, or blood on the ground. It appears only seven times, in two scenes, and both of them stay in the memory.

In Judges 7 the word does the sorting. God tells Gideon to bring his men down to the water and watch how they drink. The ones who lap the water up with the tongue, the way a dog does, are kept; the ones who kneel down to drink are sent home. The story never says that lapping is the better way. It says the test leaves three hundred men out of thousands, so nobody will be able to credit the coming victory to the size of the army.

In the stories about Ahab the same plain word turns grim. Dogs lick up the blood of Naboth, the man Ahab had killed for his vineyard, and the sentence spoken over that blood comes true when dogs lick up Ahab's own blood beside the pool of Samaria. Blood left in the open for animals to take is a picture of a death with no honor in it, and the writer reaches for an everyday drinking word rather than anything poetic.

Hebrew has a second verb for licking that leans toward consuming rather than drinking (לָחַךְ): an ox licking a field bare in Numbers 22:4, fire licking up the water in Elijah's trench in 1 Kings 18:38. This word keeps to the tongue and the liquid. Neither is the ordinary verb for drinking (שָׁתָה), which stands right beside it in Judges 7 for the men who knelt; drinking names the act, while lapping names the method.