to strike and drive with the horns: to gore an animal or a person, and so to charge an opponent and force them back
The picture behind this word never changes: a horned animal lowers its head and drives. Everything else the word does grows out of that one image. When an ox does it to a person, the law calls it goring. When an army does it to a nation, the writers keep the same word, because they are painting the army as a bull that puts its head down and shoves the enemy off the field.
That one image is why the word turns up in such different settings:
- the courtroom, where an ox has killed someone and the law weighs who is at fault
- a prophet's acted-out sign, where a man straps on iron horns and stages a coming victory
- a national lament, where the people remember that only God ever let them drive an enemy back
- visions of empires, where a ram or a well-fed sheep charges everything in its path
Two things separate it from the other Hebrew words for doing violence. It is not a blow landed with a hand or a weapon, the striking of נָגַף or the piercing of דָּקַר; here the horn is the whole point. And it does more than shift someone out of the way, which is all the Hebrew verb for shoving aside, הָדַף, claims: to strike with the horns is to wound and to overpower at once. A closely related Hebrew word for a goring animal, נַגָּח, does not name the act at all but the animal's reputation for it, the ox everyone in town already knows is dangerous.
Once, in Daniel, the word describes not one side charging but two powers hitting each other head on. That is how Hebrew pictures a war between equals: two bulls locking horns, with neither simply running the other down.