naḥam

This is the warm side of the word. To comfort someone is to come alongside a person in loss or pain and help them past it, so that the ache is no longer crushing. The picture is of bringing a troubled heart back to rest. It is what family and friends do for the bereaved, and it is the great promise God makes to a broken people.

The senses below differ mainly in who is doing the comforting and whether comfort is present or missing. People comfort one another after a death or disaster. God himself comforts his people, most famously when he tells the exiles their suffering is over. And again and again the text mourns the opposite: a sufferer who has no one to comfort them at all. That cry, comfort longed for but absent, is its own recurring note.

The same idea runs through the book of Job, where the friends arrive meaning to comfort him and instead become, in his words, miserable comforters, and where the story closes with his family finally consoling him for everything he had lost.

This is the word's other side, and it is the one that puzzles readers. The same verb that means to comfort also means to be sorry about a past act, and to back off from a course already set. The thread connecting them is reversal: a change of inner disposition that turns a person, or God, away from where they were headed.

Two shades sit here. One is felt sorrow over something done, the grief of regret, as when God is grieved that he had made humankind or that he had made Saul king. The other is a deliberate change of course, to relent, where a threatened judgment is pulled back in response to repentance or pleading, as at the golden calf, at Nineveh, and in the potter's-house principle of Jeremiah. The first is mostly an emotion, the second mostly a decision, but both are the same inward turn.

This is the language of the great texts about God changing his mind, and it cuts both ways. Some passages say God did relent; a few deny that God ever will. Scholars read those denials as ruling out fickle, human-like unreliability, or the reversal of a settled verdict, rather than claiming God has no feeling or never responds. The word does not flatten into a mere figure of speech: it names a real, responsive turn of the heart toward people.

A smaller but distinct use sits between comfort and regret. Here a person settles their own churning heart, not by being consoled from outside, but by resolving to act, usually to take revenge. The inner unrest finds release in a decision.

Esau eases himself with the plan to kill Jacob. A defeated power finds a grim relief once its rival is brought down to the grave. God speaks of easing himself of his foes, satisfying a long-held anger. The relief is real, but it comes through striking back rather than through healing.

This use matters for understanding the whole word. It is the hinge that shows comfort and regret are not two unrelated meanings but two directions of one motion: the settling of a stirred-up heart. Here the heart settles by acting, and the line between consoling oneself and avenging oneself nearly disappears.