nakhar

This is the everyday verb for the moment of recognition. You see a face, a garment, a voice, or a piece of evidence, and you know who or what it is. Jacob recognizes his son's bloodied coat; Judah recognizes the seal and cord he had left as a pledge; Boaz takes notice of Ruth; the people can tell the shout of joy from the sound of weeping. The word covers the full arc of that act, from simply catching sight of something familiar to formally acknowledging it as true.

From there the meaning widens in two natural directions. One is mental: to recognize can shade into paying attention to, taking account of, or even knowing how to do something, as when the children of mixed marriages could no longer recognize how to speak the language of Judah. The other is formal and legal: to acknowledge a claim, as when a father must acknowledge his firstborn's right.

The sharpest specialized use is a courtroom idiom. To recognize faces, literally to know faces, means to show partiality, to let who a person is sway a verdict that should rest only on the facts. The law forbids it: judges must not recognize faces, and a wise teacher warns that to recognize faces in judgment is not good. Here the ordinary good of recognition becomes a danger, because the judge is recognizing the wrong thing.

Beneath the verb for recognizing lies a second, opposite-facing sense built on the idea of foreignness, the same root that gives Hebrew its words for foreigner and foreign land. Here the action is to make something alien rather than to know it. A person can disguise herself so she will not be known, as the wife of Jeroboam does when she goes to the prophet pretending to be someone else. Joseph does the same in reverse: knowing his brothers perfectly well, he makes himself a stranger to them and speaks harshly, the play between the two senses falling in a single verse.

The sense can also be social and moral. To estrange a place is to turn it into something foreign to its true owner, as Judah did by filling Jerusalem with the worship of other gods. An enemy disguises his intentions with smooth lips while hiding malice within. To misread or disregard the plain evidence, the signs travelers could report, is to treat as strange what should be obvious.

A related shade is passive: to become unrecognizable. In the ruin of Jerusalem the starving are so wasted that they are not known in the streets. Whether the verb here means they were unrecognized or that they were disfigured, the underlying idea is the same: estrangement so deep that identity itself is lost.