mad

This word comes from the verb meaning "to measure," and that origin is the key to its clothing sense: a garment here is cloth measured and cut to a person's own body, a fitted piece rather than a loose wrap. The word covers a plain worn garment, like the one Ehud straps his hidden sword beneath, or the clothes the exhausted runner tears in grief, and it stretches to the fitted linen tunic a priest puts on for the humble task of clearing ashes from the altar.

In the Samuel stories the word takes on a sharper edge: it is battle dress and the outfit of rank. It is what Saul puts on David before the fight with Goliath, and what Jonathan strips off and hands to David, along with his sword, bow, and belt, in a gesture that quietly transfers his own standing as heir to the throne. This is a stronger, more official garment than the long robe of office (מְעִיל), and a more particular word than the everyday tunic (כְּתֹנֶת).

Because clothing signals who a person is, this one word carries a whole set of loaded moments:

• investing someone with authority, as Jonathan clothes David
• humiliation, when garments are torn or cut away
• disguise, when a garment conceals a weapon

The writers reach for it precisely because a garment measured to one body announces whose body, and whose rank, it belongs to.

The same root that gives "garment" also yields this plainer sense of a measured amount, and it surfaces in poetry. Zophar says God's wisdom is longer than the earth "in its measure" and wider than the sea, using the word for a sheer dimension, how far something reaches.

In Jeremiah the sense tilts from bare size toward an allotted share: the prophet calls a coming judgment "the portion of your measures," the lot measured out and handed to a people, set in parallel with the word for a drawn lot. Here to measure is not just to size something up but to apportion it to someone.