to hit something hard enough to damage it: a collision, whether an animal against an animal, a foot against a stone, an army broken in defeat, or God striking with plague.
The core picture is a collision: one thing runs into another hard enough to do damage. In the law codes that is all it means. Two men fighting hit a pregnant woman; one man's ox slams into his neighbor's ox. Scholars point out that this is exactly why the law does not reach for the word for goring with the horns (נָגַח) in the ox case. This verb names the impact, not the weapon that delivers it.
From that plain picture the word fans out into the three settings that fill most of the Hebrew Bible:
- a foot striking a stone, the stub or trip that costs a walker his footing
- God striking a person or a whole nation, most often with plague or sudden death
- an army broken in battle, struck down in front of its enemies
The battle use hardened into something close to a fixed phrase, "struck down before your enemies." It appears in the covenant blessings and curses, and then becomes the standard way the histories report every Israelite disaster on the field. The blow is still understood to be God's; it simply arrives through someone else's sword.
The gentlest use gave the Bible one of its best known promises, that angels will keep your foot from striking a stone. Greek translators did not try to hold all of this in one verb. They used πατάσσω for a straight blow, πταίω for a rout, and προσκόπτω for the stumbling foot. That last choice, working on the matching noun (נֶגֶף) in Isaiah, is how the image of a stone that a foot strikes against reached the New Testament.
Nuances
Whether נגף in the ox law of Exodus 21:35 denotes goring with the horns or any striking collision.
- majorityThe verb denotes any striking impact; נגח is the specific verb for goring with horns, so the ox here strikes or butts rather than gores.; W.H.C. Propp, Exodus 19-40 (Anchor Bible, Doubleday, 2006), on Exodus 21:35; C. Houtman, Exodus, vol. 3 (HCOT, Kok, 2000), on Exodus 21:35
- minorityThe two verbs are functionally equivalent for the purposes of the tort law, so the ox is understood to gore.; Rashi on Exodus 21:35, with the Talmudic tort tradition of Mishnah and Bavli Bava Qamma; M. Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Bavli, Talmud Yerushalmi, and Midrashic Literature, s.v. נגף