miḥyah

This noun is built from the verb "to live" (חָיָה), and it names the practical side of living. It is not life as a state of being. It is whatever it takes to keep a life going.

That is why English Bibles reach for such different words for it. The same noun covers:

• the rescue that keeps a whole family from starving, as when Joseph tells his brothers that God sent him ahead of them
• the harvest and the livestock a nation lives off, which raiders can strip bare in a season
• the food and clothing promised to a hired man as his keep
• the bit of strength a beaten community gets back when a foreign king finally lets them rebuild

Underneath all four is one picture: life is not simply had, it is supplied. Something has to keep coming in, or the living stops. In these passages the supplier is usually God, working through an ordinary harvest, a well-placed brother, or a sympathetic emperor.

Because the word points at the supply rather than at life itself, it can also be used of its absence. When the Cushite army is broken in 2 Chronicles, the text says there was none of this for them: no recovery, nothing left to live on.

In the priestly instructions about skin disease the word is used in a narrow, practical way. A priest examining a swelling or an old burn looks for living flesh inside it, and what he sees decides whether the person is declared clean or unclean.

What ties this to the word's other uses is the bare idea of being alive. Elsewhere it is the living of a household or a nation; here it is tissue that is alive and uncovered rather than dried over. English Bibles usually say "raw flesh" or "quick flesh," and a second reading takes the phrase the other way, as a patch of ordinary healthy flesh showing through the sore.