ma'as

This is the dominant biblical word for a deliberate, weighty rejection. It is not a passing dislike but a decision to treat a person, an offer, or a standard as worthless and to have nothing more to do with it. Because it is a relational verb, who does the rejecting and who is rejected matters more than any change in the word itself.

The Bible turns it most often into a two-way drama between God and his people. The people reject God, his law, his ways, and his messengers; in answer, God rejects them, their king, or their worship. The same verb on both sides is part of the point: the rejection is mutual and answers like for like.

It also works at the ordinary human level, where people spurn one another or despise good counsel, and it can even be turned inward, where a sufferer in the book of Job recoils from his own life or retracts what he has said. Across all of these the action is the same: to set something aside as having no value.

A separate, much rarer word that happens to be spelled the same. It has nothing to do with rejection. It describes liquid that runs off and drains away, a picture of something losing its substance and disappearing.

It surfaces only twice. In one place a sufferer's skin breaks down and runs; in the other, the wicked are wished away like water that pours out and is gone. Both images share the idea of melting and draining to nothing.