mavet

This is the ordinary word for death in the Hebrew Bible. It covers both the moment a person stops living and the lasting condition that follows, and the same form is used for a death already past (the time after someone died) and a death still feared or threatened. Hebrew rarely separates the act of dying from the state of being dead the way English can, so context, not the word itself, tells you which is in view.

From this plain sense the word spreads in two natural directions. Because death is the worst thing that can happen, it becomes a measure of severity: something can be bitter, strong, or certain as death, and a punishment can simply be called death. And because dying is the gateway out of life, the word easily slides toward the place and power that lie on the far side of it, which the next meaning gathers up.

The contrast Hebrew draws most sharply is between death and life. To set life and death before someone (Deuteronomy 30:15) is to set the whole of blessing against the whole of ruin, so the word often carries far more weight than the bare biological fact.

Hebrew poetry treats death not only as an event but as a place and a force. It has gates and chambers a person is brought into, snares and cords that catch the living, a mouth and an appetite that swallow people down. This overlaps closely with Sheol, the world of the dead, and the two words often stand side by side in the same line.

At its most vivid the word edges toward personification. Death is addressed and challenged, made the firstborn that devours the body, and bargained with in a mocking covenant. Scholars debate how far this reflects the old Canaanite figure of Death lying behind the imagery, but in the Hebrew text it functions as a hostile power under God, not a rival deity, and the prophets look to its final defeat.

Keep this meaning distinct from the plain event of meaning 1: here death is somewhere a person can be dragged and something that can act, not merely the fact that a life has ended.

The same word names death as a legal or moral verdict. A wrong can be a matter of death deserving the death penalty, and a person can be called a son of death, an idiom meaning someone doomed or sentenced to die. Here the focus is not on dying itself but on the judgment that a death is owed.

This sits naturally beside the first meaning, since the penalty is still ordinary death, but it is worth separating because the word is doing the work of a sentence rather than describing an event. The reader should feel the verdict, not just the outcome.

Closely related is the use of death to label one of the fates assigned to a doomed people, where to death can single out deadly plague or pestilence as the lot of some while others fall to sword, famine, or captivity.