nata

The standard lexica agree on a tripartite range. BDB (pp. 642-643) and HALOT order the entry as (1) literal planting of trees, vines, and gardens, (2) the figurative planting of a people, that is, divine settlement and election (Exod 15:17; 2 Sam 7:10; Amos 9:15; Jeremiah passim), and (3) a concrete sense to fix, drive in, pitch (nails in Eccl 12:11, tents in Dan 11:45); BDB derives the whole range from an underlying physical sense to drive in, fix firmly, and Lipinski concurs. Comparative philology (Militarev-Kogan; Huehnergard) shows the root is a Northwest Semitic isogloss productive in Hebrew, Phoenician, and Aramaic but absent from Akkadian and Ge'ez, which strengthens the concrete physical core over an inherited agricultural sense; Gesenius's older Indo-European etymology is now rejected. HALOT records the single Niphal at Isa 40:24; all other occurrences are Qal. DCH organizes the entry by subject and object frame and uniquely adds the Qumran designation of the community as an everlasting plantation. TDOT (vol. IX) treats God as planter (Eden, the heavens, the ear), the planting of Israel, and the programmatic plant-and-uproot pair in Jeremiah. The lexica consistently distinguish this verb from sow (zara, broadcasting seed) and transplant (shatal, resetting an established plant near water), a contrast that explains why Psalm 1 and Jeremiah 17 use transplant, not plant, of the righteous tree (so Kraus; Hossfeld-Zenger). On the Jeremiah word-pair, Bach's 1961 study established that build-and-plant is inherited covenantal vocabulary rather than Jeremiah's coinage, a point Brueggemann's two-volume commentary develops as the structuring image of judgment and restoration. The two live debates are not lexical but historical: the redactional origin of the verb-pair in Jeremiah 1:10 (authentic, per Holladay and Lundbom, versus Deuteronomistic, per Carroll, McKane, and Schmid), and the dating of Amos 9:15 (post-exilic, per Wolff, Mays, and Jeremias, versus eighth-century, defended by Paul).