natah

This is the plain physical core of the word: to take something and reach or spread it out so it covers ground or fills space. A hand or a staff is thrust forward, a measuring line is run out, a tent cloth is pulled taut over its poles.

From this everyday picture the Bible builds two of its grandest images. God spreads out the sky the way a person pitches a tent, unrolling it like a curtain over the earth. And God's saving power is pictured as an arm reached out at full length, the famous outstretched arm that rescued Israel from Egypt. In every case the action is the same: something is extended outward from its source into the open.

The sense covers both the act of stretching and the resulting stretched-out state, which is why the word can describe a tent already pitched or heavens already spread as easily as the act of pitching or spreading them.

Here the stretching is no longer of an object but of one's own course. To turn aside is to break off from the line you were on and head a different way, whether stepping off a road, turning in to a person, or drifting from a loyalty you once held.

The direction can be good or bad. A traveler turns aside into a city, a man turns in to a woman, a king turns the army a certain way. But the same word carries the heavy sense of turning away: hearts that turn after other gods, a people that will not turn back to the LORD. The act is neutral; what matters is what one turns toward or away from.

This is also the word for things that lean or sag off true: a wall about to topple, feet that nearly slipped, the long shadow of late day stretching and slipping toward dark.

This is a fixed expression of Israel's law and prophets. To bend or push aside someone's case is to twist a verdict away from what is right, almost always at the expense of the poor, the orphan, the foreigner, or the innocent.

The picture is the same turning aside as before, now applied to a court: the judge shoves the case off its true line, usually because a bribe or a powerful party has leaned on the scales. The Bible names this among the sins God most fiercely condemns, because it strips justice from exactly those who have no other defender.

It is grouped here as its own meaning because the standard translations and the lexicons treat it as a settled legal idiom with its own force, not merely a stray instance of turning aside.

When the thing extended is the ear or the heart, the word means to turn one's attention or affection in a direction. To incline the ear is to lean in and listen; the prayers of the Psalms beg God to do exactly this, to bend down and hear.

It works the other way too. A person can incline the heart, their own or another's, toward wisdom, toward God's commands, or away from them toward greed. God himself can turn a king's heart wherever he wishes, the way water is channeled.

The image stays physical: an ear tipped toward a sound, a heart leaned toward an object of desire or devotion. What is bent is not a road or a court but the inner faculty of attention and will.