straits: distress felt as crushing pressure, the tight place a person is squeezed into with no room left
This is a rare, poetic word for distress, and the picture behind it is physical. It is built from a verb that means to press hard on someone until there is no room left (צוּק), so the noun names the squeeze itself: the tight spot a person is jammed into and cannot get out of alone.
Almost every time it appears, it stands beside a near twin, so the trouble gets named twice over:
- In the refrain of Psalm 107 the people cry out to the LORD "in their trouble" and he brings them out of "their distresses".
- Zephaniah 1:15 calls the day of the LORD "a day of trouble and distress".
- Job 15:24 says that "distress and anguish" terrify the wicked man and overpower him like a king ready for battle.
The doubling is not filler. Piling one pressure word on another is how Hebrew poetry says the pressure is total, and English usually flattens it into two ordinary words for trouble.
Five of its seven appearances are plural and attached to a person: "my distresses", "their distresses". Hebrew uses a plural like this for an experience pressing in from every side at once, and the words that go with it are words of rescue. He delivered them, he saved them, he brought them out. That is the word's home ground: it names the corner a person is in at the moment they call for help.
The other two appearances turn it around. There the pressure is not a place to be pulled out of but a force that arrives, terrifying the man in Job and labelling the day of judgment in Zephaniah. A closely related word from the same root (מָצוֹק) covers nearly the same ground, but it keeps different company, belonging to the siege language of Deuteronomy and Jeremiah rather than to the psalms of rescue.