naḥat

This noun names stillness itself. It belongs with the verb for coming to rest and settling down (נוּחַ), and it stays on the calm rather than on the place a person finds it (מְנוּחָה). Whatever was straining, shouting, or hurrying has stopped, and what is left is this.

Most of its uses sit in Ecclesiastes, where it names what a person actually wants out of a life: a handful held in quiet is worth more than two fistfuls won by grinding effort. The same calm belongs to the wise, whose words land without being shouted, and it is exactly what never arrives when a wise man takes a fool to court.

Isaiah gives the word its weight. Judah is scrambling to buy Egyptian protection, and the prophet says that turning back and keeping still is what would save them. Standing in the same line as the word for going undisturbed (שָׁקַט), the quiet here is not idleness but a refusal to run elsewhere for help, and Judah wanted none of it.

A second Hebrew word is spelled exactly like the first and means something else entirely. It belongs with the plain verb for going down (יָרַד), and it names the downward motion itself rather than the thing that moves or the target it reaches.

Isaiah pictures God letting his majestic voice be heard and letting his arm be seen coming down, in a storm of hail and cloudburst and consuming fire. The word is the swing of the blow.

Its only other possible home is a line in Elihu's speech in Job, and that line is argued over. Read as this word, it describes what is set down on a table heaped with rich food. Read as the word for quiet, it describes the ease of that table instead.