miqveh

This is a rare word for hope, used only five times, and it leans a particular way. The commoner Hebrew word for hope (תִּקְוָה) usually names the expectation a person holds. This one usually names the one the expectation rests on: three of its five uses address the LORD directly as "Hope of Israel," which is closer to "the one Israel is waiting on" than to any feeling.

The other two uses are the plainer kind. Ezra is told that "there is hope for Israel" even after a national failure, and a prayer of David says that human life passes like a shadow with nothing lasting to count on. In both, the word points ahead to an outcome that is still open.

What holds the two together is waiting. The verb behind it (קָוָה) means to wait for something, so hope here is not optimism about how things feel but a settled looking toward what is coming, or toward the one who is bringing it.

Water that has run together and now stands in one place: that is the whole idea. The word can name the water itself, as when the gathered waters are called "Seas" on the third day of creation, or the place that holds it, as when a plague turns every pool in Egypt to blood.

Leviticus uses it for a body of water big enough to stay clean. A spring (מַעְיָן) or a cistern of collected water is not spoiled by a dead animal falling in, unlike a jar or a pot. That one verse became the basis of the later Jewish immersion pool, which is still called a mikveh after this word.

A closely paired spelling (מִקְוָה) names the reservoir Hezekiah's builders cut inside Jerusalem's walls. Between them the two words cover the whole range, from an ocean to a tank a person digs.

These four uses, spread across two accounts of the same event, are not the hope word or the water word at all. Most scholars now read the letters as the name of a place, Kue, a horse-breeding region north of Israel that Assyrian records of the same period also name. Read that way, the sentence gives two sources for Solomon's horses, Egypt and Kue, which fits the trading the chapter describes.

Older English Bibles took the same letters as an ordinary noun and produced "linen yarn," a guess that has not held up. Chronicles spells the word with a different final letter than Kings does, which is easier to explain in a foreign place name than in a common Hebrew noun.

So a reader comparing versions here meets real disagreement about what the word even is, not only about how best to render it.