nahag

This is the ordinary word for making something move along under your direction, whether you are behind it pushing it forward or in front of it guiding the way. Its most basic use is a herdsman driving animals: a shepherd moving a flock, a raider driving off captured cattle, a servant urging on a donkey. From there it stretches naturally to driving a cart or a chariot, and to a wind that God sends and steers across the land.

The same word rises to describe leading people. A conqueror drives prisoners off into exile the way one drives cattle, and in the darkest uses God himself is said to drive his own people out among the nations. But the very same verb, turned tender, becomes one of the Bible's warmest pictures of God as shepherd, gently leading his people to water and rest.

What holds all of these together is a single idea: purposeful movement imposed from outside. Someone or something is kept going in a chosen direction. Whether the tone is harsh (herding, driving off, scattering) or gentle (shepherding, guiding home) depends entirely on who is doing the leading and why, not on the word itself.

This is a separate, much rarer word that happens to be spelled the same as the common verb for driving and leading. It appears only once, picturing captive women lamenting, moaning like doves and beating their breasts.

Because it shows up a single time, scholars are not fully agreed on it. Some treat it as its own word for mourning; others suspect the one occurrence is really the common driving-and-leading verb, describing the women being led away. The picture in the passage, moaning that sounds like the cooing of doves, is what leads most standard reference works to recognize a distinct word for grieving here.