natsal

The picture under this word is a hand reaching in and pulling someone out of harm before it closes over them. It is rescue as a decisive yank to safety, not a slow process of healing or repair. The one in danger may be cornered by an enemy, drowning, trapped, or marked for death, and the rescuer pulls them clear.

Most often the rescuer is God, and the word becomes a staple of prayer and praise: the cry "rescue me" and the testimony "he rescued me." It runs through the Psalms, the deliverance from Egypt, and the prophets. But people rescue too, whether a shepherd snatching a lamb from a lion's mouth or a leader pulling his people out of an enemy's grip.

Because the core idea is being pulled out of the grip of something, the word can stress what a person is being saved from (an enemy, the grave, sin) more than the safe place they end up. A closely related shade is escaping or being plucked free oneself rather than being rescued by another, but the underlying motion, out of danger, is the same.

The same motion of snatching can be turned the other way: instead of pulling a person out of danger, it pulls goods or clothing off and away. Here the word means to strip something off and take it, whether stripping plunder from a defeated enemy or pulling ornaments off oneself.

This sense is rare and clusters around a few events. Israel "stripped" the Egyptians of their silver and gold at the exodus, taking what was given as they left. After a battle, Jehoshaphat's people spent days stripping the spoil from the fallen. And at Sinai the people pulled off their ornaments as a sign of mourning.

The link to the rescue sense is the shared gesture of snatching away. What is snatched, a captive set free or valuables taken, is what makes the two meanings genuinely different words in use, even though they share one root.