nuph

The picture behind this word is a sweeping motion of the hand, or of something held in the hand. What English calls it depends on what is moved and why. You wield a blade over a stone, you wave or shake a hand at a place, you brandish a fist at someone weaker, you shake rain down from the sky. Underneath all of these is the one swinging, to-and-fro motion.

Its most common use is a religious one, the wave offering. A worshiper or a priest presents a gift to God by moving it with a set gesture at the altar, marking it as handed over. Nearly every place this word appears in the law of offerings, this is what it describes. Scholars debate whether that gesture was a side-to-side waving or a lifting up and setting down, which is why some translations call it a wave offering and others an elevation offering.

Away from the altar the same motion often carries force or menace. To wave the hand over a place can mean to claim power over it or to threaten it, as when God stretches out his hand against a nation or a river, or when someone raises a hand against an orphan. In a few places the motion turns toward scattering or separating: shaking rain loose from the clouds, or sifting nations as grain is shaken in a sieve.

This is a separate word that only happens to be spelled like the word for waving. It appears a single time, in a seduction scene in Proverbs, where a woman says she has perfumed her bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. The sense is to sprinkle or scent a place so it smells sweet.

Because it turns up only once and looks exactly like the far more common waving verb, it is easy to miss. The standard dictionaries keep the two apart as unrelated words.