to receive, grant, or hold an inheritance: to come into permanent family property, or to pass it on, as a gift kept within the family
This verb belongs to the world of family land and lasting property. Its noun partner, nachalah, names the permanent family estate that a household holds and hands down, and the verb describes the action around that estate:
- coming into it
- parceling it out
- giving it away
- taking it for one's own
- passing it down
At its heart it is not about a will read after a death so much as about a gift that stays in the family and cannot simply be sold off, the kind of holding scholars find already in legal texts from the city of Mari long before Israel.
Because the same action can be seen from more than one side, the verb shifts naturally between giver and receiver.
- Israel receives the land of Canaan
- Moses and the leaders apportion it out by lot
- God grants it
- a father bequeaths to his sons
- a conqueror takes captives as a lasting possession
The senses below sort these by who is doing what, but they are all one idea: property that is granted, held, and handed on within a family or a people. In a few striking places the direction even reverses, and God is the one who takes a people or a land as his own treasured holding.
Writers also stretch the word past land. A person can come to possess honor or folly, the wind or a pack of lies. These figurative uses lean on the literal one: whatever you come to hold for keeps, for good or ill, is your inheritance.
A related but separate verb, yarash (יָרַשׁ), covers possession seized by driving others out. This verb instead carries the gentler note of property granted and received, which is exactly why it matters in a story like Naboth refusing to sell his family land to a king.