to pull up and move on: to strike a camp and set out, or to wrench something loose from where it was fixed
At its root this word pictures a tent being taken down: pulling the pegs out of the ground so a camp can be dismantled and the group can move on. Everything the word does grows out of that one image, something planted or pitched is pulled loose so it can travel. From it come the plain sense of a company setting out stage by stage, the causative sense of leading or driving others out, the picture of a wind springing up and rushing across the sky, the violent uprooting of a tent, a vine, or a life, and even the cutting of stone out of a quarry.
By far the most common use is the traveler's: a person or a whole people breaking camp and journeying on. This is the signature verb of Israel's wilderness march, and its natural home is the book of Numbers, where more than half of all its appearances cluster. It pairs again and again with the verb for pitching camp, forming a steady rhythm of setting out and settling down that maps the forty-year journey from Egypt toward the promised land. The march is never aimless: the people set out only when the cloud lifts from the tabernacle and only at the LORD's command, so the word carries the weight of an ordered, God-directed advance rather than a random ramble.
The causative uses keep the same core image but change who does the pulling: Moses leads Israel out from the Red Sea, God drives his people forward like a flock, God makes the east wind blow, or God tears a vine out of Egypt to replant it. In poetry the word reaches for its most concrete picture again, a dying man's tent is struck and folded up, a person's hope is torn out by the roots like a felled tree, and Jerusalem is promised a tent whose stakes will never be pulled up. Because the poets lean on the literal tent-peg image, readers who know the word only from the travel narratives can miss how much force these lines carry.