mishkav

This is a place-word built from the ordinary verb for lying down. At its plainest it names the piece of furniture or the mat a person sleeps on, and by extension the spot where someone lies. The same word covers the sickbed of a person too weak to rise, the bed where a sleeper is murdered, and the lavish couch a deathbed is prepared on.

Because a bed is where people are at their most vulnerable, the word often carries that overtone. It is where treachery strikes the sleeping, where the sick wait out their illness, and where the heart talks to itself in the dark. The bed can stand in for the whole experience of night and rest.

The one consistent thread is the physical place of lying down. Whether the scene is sleep, sickness, scheming, or death, this sense always points to an actual bed, couch, or resting spot.

Hebrew, like many languages, names sex by pointing to the bed rather than the act. The plural form of this word becomes a fixed expression for sexual intercourse, most plainly in the law that forbids one man lying with another the way one lies with a woman.

The expression covers both honorable and dishonorable relations. It marks a young woman as one who has or has not had sex, condemns forbidden unions, and names the bed where an unfaithful wife meets her lovers. In one notorious line it describes a son who violated his father's marriage bed.

This is the same root idea as the first meaning, the place of lying down, narrowed to a specific act. A reader should recognize it as a guarded, indirect way of speaking about sex, not a separate physical object.