to make contact: for one thing to reach another and touch it, whether lightly, harmfully, or all the way to a place or time
At its heart this word is about contact, one thing reaching another until the two meet. Everything it means grows out of that single picture. The gentlest end is an ordinary touch: a hand laid on something, a wing brushing a wall, lips touched to a coal.
The same contact turns serious when what is touched is holy or unclean. Touch the mountain where God has come down and you die; touch a corpse or a diseased thing and the uncleanness passes into you. Here the word does not change its meaning, only its stakes: contact that ordinarily means nothing now carries danger or defilement.
When the one reaching out is God, or trouble sent from him, the touch lands as a blow. To say calamity has touched a person, or that God touched Job's flesh or struck a king with disease, is to use the same verb for a contact that wounds. Stretch the picture across distance and it becomes reaching: a ladder whose top reaches heaven, a flood that reaches up to the neck, a report that reaches the king, a season that has come, a set time that has arrived. The word never stops meaning contact; it simply measures how far the reach goes and how hard it lands.