mukh

BDB glosses the verb "be low, depressed, grow poor" and compares Aramaic מוך "sink, bend down" alongside Syriac mkk "be brought low, humbled"; Klein gives "to be low, be depressed, become poor" and identifies the adjective מָךְ "poor, lowly" as properly the participle of this verb, so this corner of the poverty vocabulary yields no independent noun. The dominant Semitist handling treats מוּךְ (hollow) and מָכַךְ (geminate) as byforms of a single biconsonantal base mk "be low", since the geminate verb is demonstrably physical or figurative for humiliation at Psalm 106:43, Ecclesiastes 10:18 and Job 24:24; a minority handling keeps them formally distinct roots that merely overlap semantically. The formal question carries semantic weight: on the majority view the economic sense in Leviticus is a specialization of a spatial base, whereas a strictly functional reading treats "grow poor" as simply the meaning in Biblical Hebrew, given that all five attestations are economic. HALOT (מוך I), Gesenius 18, TDOT/ThWAT, TLOT and NIDOTTE could not be verified verbatim for the underlying study and should be checked before quotation. The strongest East Semitic comparandum is Akkadian makû "to be lacking, deficient; destitute". On the exegesis, Milgrom built an influential staged reading on the verb's inceptive force, taking the recurring protasis כִּי־יָמוּךְ אָחִיךָ as the structural refrain that divides Leviticus 25 into successive stages of destitution, each with its own graduated remedy (Leviticus 23-27, pp. 2091-2093); Joosten situates the same laws within the Holiness material's tenancy theology, in which the land is the Lord's and Israelites are His tenants, so a brother's loss of land is a theological crisis; Levine, Hartley and Gerstenberger likewise read the protasis as the chapter's organizing device, with Gerstenberger taking the material as more programmatic than practiced. Whether the program is serious reform (Milgrom, with a relatively early setting for much of the Holiness material) or a utopian blueprint (a reading built on Westbrook, de Vaux and Gerstenberger, with Stackert arguing that the debt-slave of Leviticus 25 gains less real relief than Milgrom allowed) remains disputed, as does the relative order of the Priestly and Holiness strata (Knohl, Nihan). Pleins situates the vocabulary within the Priestly concern for the fellow Israelite rather than the anonymous poor of wisdom and prophecy. The Septuagint declines a stereotyped equivalent, spreading the verb across πένομαι, ταπεινόω/ταπεινός and ἀπορέω, which suggests its translators heard both "be poor" and "be brought low" in the root; Büchner notes the well chosen ἀδυνατέω at 25:35 for the paired Hebrew idiom about a faltering hand.