makhov

• Stacks up into the plural, naming many separate pains at once, so it can describe a whole life or a whole people full of sorrows.Exo 3:7Psa 32:10Ecc 2:23
• Names sorrows that one person can carry for another, or that God sees in an entire people, not only the grief a sufferer feels in himself.Isa 53:4Psa 69:26

• Both settle in as grief that will not lift, an ache the sufferer calls unrelenting or beyond cure.Jer 15:18Jer 30:15
• Both are words a lament reaches for to put one's own raw suffering into words before God.Psa 39:2Psa 38:17

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• Names the grief of a whole people under slavery or exile rather than a bodily illness in one person.Exo 3:7Jer 30:15Jer 45:3
• Describes the inward anguish that grows out of wisdom, toil, or the cruelty of others, with no sick body in view at all.Ecc 1:18Ecc 2:23Psa 69:26
• Carries the repeated lament over Jerusalem's fall, asking whether any sorrow compares to it.Lam 1:12Lam 1:18

• Both words describe the suffering servant in the same two verses: he is called a man familiar with the one, and said to carry the other, so together they cover the full weight of what he bears on behalf of others.Isa 53:3Isa 53:4

• Names a literal bodily illness that a king is struck down with, one severe enough that people ask directly whether he will recover from it.2Ki 8:82Ki 8:9
• Marks the specific illness, tied to a named part of the body, that eventually kills the person it strikes.2Ch 16:122Ch 21:182Ki 13:14
• Listed among the covenant curses God threatens to send or promises to remove, itemized alongside other named diseases.Deu 7:15Deu 28:61

• Reaches into the body: physical pain suffered on the sickbed, not only distress of the heart.Job 33:19
• A wound that calls for healing, spoken of as incurable or as needing balm.Jer 30:15Jer 51:8

• Both name deep inner distress, and the two are stacked together in one lament, piling grief upon grief.Jer 45:3
• Both can describe the heart's anguish under affliction, the wearing sorrow of a suffering life.Psa 31:10Lam 1:12

• Names grief that lives only in the mind and heart, the ache of anxious thought and mourning, never a pain of the body.Psa 13:2Jer 8:18
• A reversible sorrow that joy drives out: set opposite gladness and named as what will flee away or be turned to rejoicing.Isa 35:10Est 9:22Jer 31:13

• Names the pain itself, as a thing a person carries and can add up: the wicked have many of them (Psalm 32:10), a sufferer says his own is always right in front of him (Psalm 38:17), and Ecclesiastes reckons a whole lifetime as made of them (Ecclesiastes 2:23).Psa 32:10Psa 38:17Ecc 2:23
• Covers bodily pain and sickness, so it travels with the language of treatment and healing: a man corrected by pain on his sickbed (Job 33:19), a wound whose pain is called "incurable" (Jeremiah 30:15), and a broken city for whom mourners are told to fetch balm in the hope she may be healed (Jeremiah 51:8).Job 33:19Jer 30:15Jer 51:8
• The pain can rise from inside a person with nobody inflicting it at all: adding knowledge adds it (Ecclesiastes 1:18), and a mind that will not rest at night keeps it going (Ecclesiastes 2:23).Ecc 1:18Ecc 2:23
• Because the pain stands as something in its own right, it can be seen by God or shouldered by another person: the LORD says he knows the pains of his people in Egypt (Exodus 3:7), Solomon prays for anyone who knows his own hurt (2 Chronicles 6:29), and the suffering servant is called "a man of pains" who carries ours (Isaiah 53:3, Isaiah 53:4).Exo 3:72Ch 6:29Isa 53:3Isa 53:4

• They describe one and the same suffering from two sides, and the single verse that uses both puts them side by side rather than in competition: the pain Jerusalem feels is exactly what the LORD's grieving of her produced (Lamentations 1:12).Lam 1:12
• Both trace the suffering to God rather than to bad luck, and both are held up for outsiders to look at: Jerusalem stops the passers by and asks them to see whether any pain is like hers, the pain the LORD brought on the day of his burning anger (Lamentations 1:12).Lam 1:12

• Names the act of laying sorrow on somebody, so it always comes with a doer as well as a sufferer: enemies who trampled Israel and told her to lie down so they could walk over her (Isaiah 51:23), and the LORD himself when he brought Jerusalem down for her rebellion (Lamentations 1:5).Isa 51:23Lam 1:5
• Sorrow can be inflicted by speech alone: Job asks his three friends how long they will keep grieving him and crushing him with words, with no wound or illness anywhere in view.Job 19:2
• It also describes people in the state of having been grieved, naming them by their sorrow rather than naming the sorrow itself: the young women of Jerusalem with no festival crowds left to join (Lamentations 1:4), and those who grieve because the appointed feasts are gone (Zephaniah 3:18).Lam 1:4Zep 3:18
• Because it names something God does, it opens the question of whether he wanted to do it, and Lamentations answers: he brings the grief and then shows compassion out of his great loyal love (Lamentations 3:32), and he does not do it gladly (Lamentations 3:33).Lam 3:32Lam 3:33

• It gives the hurt a name, so a person can own it, add it up, and be known by it. The wicked have many pains (Psalm 32:10), a driven man's days come out as one long string of them (Ecclesiastes 2:23), and the servant is described as a man of sorrows (Isaiah 53:3).Psa 32:10Ecc 2:23Isa 53:3
• Because the pain has a name, someone else can see it, know it, and measure it against their own. God says he knows the pains of his people in Egypt (Exodus 3:7), a worshipper brings to prayer the hurt he knows to be his (2 Chronicles 6:29), and Jerusalem stops passersby to ask whether any pain is like hers (Lamentations 1:12).Exo 3:72Ch 6:29Lam 1:12
• Once named, the pain can be handled: carried by somebody else, treated, or given a prognosis. The servant carries sorrows that were ours (Isaiah 53:4), balm is called for in the hope that a city may yet be healed (Jeremiah 51:8), and pain is what pins a man to his bed under correction (Job 33:19).Isa 53:4Jer 51:8Job 33:19

• Both are used of suffering that comes from God's own hand, not only from enemies or accident: Job says God is the one who hurts and then bandages (Job 5:18), and Jeremiah tells the city that its pain is the blow God struck (Jeremiah 30:15).Job 5:18Jer 30:15
• Both belong to the honest complaint of a sufferer who says the hurt out loud rather than hiding it: one psalmist calls himself afflicted and hurting (Psalm 69:29), and another says his pain is never out of his sight (Psalm 38:17).Psa 69:29Psa 38:17
• Both run from bodily injury all the way to grief of mind, with no line drawn between the two. Israel's wisdom writers use one for a heart that aches behind a laugh (Proverbs 14:13) and the other for the sorrow that grows along with knowledge (Ecclesiastes 1:18).Pro 14:13Ecc 1:18

• It reports hurting as something happening to somebody at a particular moment, tied to a scene rather than named as a thing. On the third day the men of Shechem were still too sore from their wounds to defend themselves (Genesis 34:25), a living man feels his own body ache (Job 14:22), and a heart can be aching in the middle of laughter (Proverbs 14:13).Gen 34:25Job 14:22Pro 14:13
• It can put someone on the giving end of the hurt, which a word that simply names pain never does. God is the one who wounds before he binds up (Job 5:18), lying prophets break the heart of honest people (Ezekiel 13:22), and a thorn goes on jabbing those around it (Ezekiel 28:24).Job 5:18Ezk 13:22Ezk 28:24
• It stretches past living sufferers to ruin done to things that cannot feel anything: Israel is told to spoil every good field by throwing stones over it (2 Kings 3:19).2Ki 3:19

• Names the suffering itself, including bodily pain and sickness, as something a person feels rather than a task they perform.Job 33:19Psa 38:17
• Reaches into inward grief and sorrow of mind, the ache that more knowledge or a heavy day can bring.Ecc 1:18Ecc 2:23
• Is the word for borne or representative suffering, the pain one person carries on behalf of others.Isa 53:3Isa 53:4

• Both name a hardship traced to God's hand, an affliction or burden that he lays on a person rather than mere bad luck.Lam 1:12Gen 3:16

• Names painful, wearing labor rather than the feeling of pain, the grinding effort it costs a person to get their bread from the ground.Gen 3:17Gen 5:29
• Belongs to the Eden curse narrative alone, marking the hard lot of human work and childbearing imposed at the fall.Gen 3:16