nu'aḥ

This is the plain, ground-level sense of the word: something in motion stops and stays.

• the ark stops drifting and grounds on the mountains
• a swarm of locusts or insects settles onto the land
• birds alight on a body

From that picture the word reaches into human life, where it names the quiet that follows struggle:

• people rest from their enemies
• the dead rest from their toil
• a land falls quiet after war

The same verb describes how something invisible takes up a settled place. The spirit of the LORD comes to rest on a person and stays there, in deliberate contrast to the older language of the spirit suddenly rushing on a leader.

• wisdom comes to rest in a thoughtful heart
• anger lodges in a fool
• the LORD's hand settles on a place

In every case the idea is the same, a coming-to-quiet that abides rather than passes.

It is this sense that lies behind God's own rest on the seventh day after making the world, the picture that gives the Sabbath its shape and is later taken up as a promise of a rest still waiting to be entered.

Here the word turns active and the subject is almost always God. He gives his people rest, meaning he secures them in the land and quiets the enemies around them so that war and threat stop. This is one of the great connecting threads of the Old Testament story: rest is

• promised in the wilderness
• granted when the land is settled
• renewed when a king is established
• finally tied to the building of the temple, the place where the LORD himself comes to rest among his people

The rest is always a gift, never something the people seize. Where people grasp and fight, God by contrast gives rest. This is why later Scripture can speak of a rest that has been offered and is still on offer, not yet fully entered, and why prophets can hold out that same rest as the thing a hardened people refuse.

A related use applies the same verb to anger rather than to people. God causes his fury to settle, that is, to spend itself fully and be done, so that his wrath comes to rest. The picture is the same coming-to-quiet, here applied to wrath that is exhausted rather than to a people made safe.

This is a plain, everyday sense with none of the weight of the others: to set a thing down in a place.

• a jar of manna is placed before the LORD
• garments are laid aside in a room
• stones are set up as a memorial
• the LORD sets a person down in the middle of a valley

The thing is put where it belongs and stays there.

From placing a thing, the word slides easily into leaving it. To set something down and walk away is to leave it behind, to leave it where it is, or to leave a person alone.

• So God leaves certain nations in the land rather than driving them out
• a man leaves his property in someone's keeping
• a dying person leaves his wealth to an heir
• the urgent plea "leave me alone" uses this same verb

The common thread is releasing a thing into a fixed place or state and no longer acting on it.

The lexicons note that this active sense follows a slightly different pattern of the verb from the "give rest" sense above, and many scholars think it grew from a separate but closely related old root. In the Hebrew Bible the two have merged under one word, but their meanings stay distinct: one settles people in safety, the other simply puts a thing down.