mut

This is the plain, ordinary word for dying. It covers every kind of death the Bible reports: old age at the end of a long life, sudden death by violence or accident, death from plague or famine, and the death sentence God warns will follow disobedience. The word itself does not say how a person died or whether the death was deserved; it simply states that life ended.

Because it is the basic word, it carries the weight of some of the Bible's heaviest moments. It is the word in the first warning to the man and woman, "you will surely die," and the word that closes the long lists of the early generations, "and he died." When the subject is a person who has already died, the same word in its naming form means "a dead person" or "a corpse."

A few of its uses press past simple biology. To be near death, to feel as good as dead from fear or grief, or to face a death the law has decreed are all carried by this one word. What ties them together is not the cause but the outcome: the end of life.

The same verb, in its causing forms, turns the action around: instead of someone dying, someone is made to die. This is the word for putting a person to death, whether by a sword in battle, by an executioner carrying out a sentence, or by God striking someone down.

Much of its use is legal. The law repeatedly states that an offender "shall surely be put to death," using a passive form that names the penalty without yet naming who carries it out. The active form is used when a particular person does the killing, from a soldier finishing a wounded enemy to a king ordering a rival's death.

A small group of uses intensify the picture to mean dispatching or finishing someone off, the deliberate, completed act of making sure a wounded person is dead. The line between this and the plainer "put to death" is a matter of force, not of a different idea.