to deliver a blow: to strike someone or something, whether a single hit, a fatal stroke, a battlefield rout, or an affliction sent from God
At its core this word is a single physical act: to bring a hand, weapon, or force down on a target. Everything it means radiates out from that one picture of a blow landing. The blow can be light or deadly, aimed at a person, an army, or a thing, and the word leaves the outcome to the surrounding words. That is why English Bibles render it so many different ways depending on what got hit and how hard.
The senses fan out by who or what is struck and to what effect. The same verb that describes one person hitting another (a quarrel, a beating, a wound) describes an executioner killing a single man, an army crushing a whole nation, and God himself sending a plague or a hailstorm down on the land. The change is not in the verb but in its object and its result.
A few uses turn the picture inward or toward nature. A guilty conscience is said to strike the person who feels it, the sun strikes a traveler with heatstroke, and a crop is struck, meaning blighted. These are the same blow felt in a setting other than hand-to-hand violence.
Because the word itself does not tell you whether the one struck lived or died, context always carries that weight. Reading a fatal sense into a verse that only describes a beating, or a mere slap into a verse that describes a killing, is the most common way to misread it.