to lift or raise something up: to take it from where it rests and hold it higher
This is the plain, physical heart of the word: to pick something up and hold it higher than it was. Everything else the verb does grows out of that one motion, which is why the lexicons treat lifting as the root idea and the rest as branches of it.
Hebrew uses the same verb for the body parts a person raises in a charged moment, and the gesture carries the feeling. To lift the eyes is to look toward something, often with hope or longing. To lift the voice is to cry out, weep, or sing aloud. To lift the hand is to swear a solemn oath. To lift the soul is to set one's deepest desire on someone, in dependence or in prayer. A speaker can also lift up a saying, meaning he raises his voice to deliver a proverb, an oracle, or a lament: the prophet Balaam lifts up his oracle over Israel, and a mourner lifts up a lament over the dead. These are not separate words: they are this verb plus the thing raised.
One idiom deserves special notice. To lift another person's face is an old gesture of welcome: a humbled petitioner bows face to the ground, and the one in power raises that face to show acceptance. So when the priestly blessing asks that the LORD lift up his face toward you, it pictures God turning to a person in favor. The same gesture turns ugly in a courtroom: a judge who lifts the face of one party is showing favoritism where he owes everyone an even hand.
Finally, when the verb describes something raised high in itself, it can shade from honor into arrogance. A mountain or a throne is lifted high, God himself is exalted, but a person lifted up in his own eyes is simply proud, and that pride is what judgment topples.
Nuances
What it means to "take up" or "bear" the name of God in vain (Exodus 20:7 // Deuteronomy 5:11). The field now holds about five overlapping readings rather than a settled consensus: a false or perjurious oath; a deliberately broad ban on misusing the name (false oath plus magical invocation, false prophecy, unfulfilled vows, hypocritical worship); a primarily magical or incantational misuse; any frivolous or pointless utterance of the name; and the literal carrying of God's name as an identity that must not be misrepresented. The center of gravity in critical scholarship remains the oath/speech pole, the bearing reading is its leading recent challenger, and that challenge has itself drawn a substantive rebuttal.
- majorityThe verb is shorthand for an oath, so the command forbids invoking God's name in a false or perjurious oath, with "in vain" carrying the sense "falsely." The weightiest support is Psalm 24:4, which combines this verb and "in vain" in step with "swear deceitfully," and the substitution of "in vain" (Deut 5:20) for "false" (Exod 20:16) in the parallel false-witness command, evidence the two words are near-synonyms in this corpus. The cleanest internal example of the verb in plain oath function is 1 Kings 8:31, where it governs the explicit oath-object "curse," not "name." This is the long-dominant critical reading.; Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary, 1996); Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1-11 (Anchor Bible 5, 1991); William H. C. Propp, Exodus 19-40 (Anchor Bible 2A, 2006); Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus (JPS Torah Commentary, 1991); Peter C. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy (NICOT, 1976)
- majorityThe prohibition is deliberately broad and not limited to perjury: it covers the false oath plus magical invocation of the name, false prophecy, unfulfilled vows, and frivolous or hypocritical appeals to it. "In vain" is held open to mean both "empty/worthless" and "false," the ambiguity being intentional. On the fullest form of this view the command holds two horizons together on purpose, forbidding the false oath as its primary legal application while opening onto the wider vocation of carrying God's name with integrity, so the oath and bearing readings need not be forced into a single choice; several who argue this way commend it as the most balanced account of the whole body of evidence. This is the second main wing of the dominant oath/speech pole.; John I. Durham, Exodus (Word Biblical Commentary 3, 1987); Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus (Old Testament Library, 1974); Cornelis Houtman, Exodus, vol. 3 (Historical Commentary on the Old Testament, 2000); Patrick D. Miller, The Ten Commandments (Interpretation, 2009); David L. Baker, The Decalogue: Living as the People of God (IVP Academic, 2017); Walter Harrelson, The Ten Commandments and Human Rights (revised ed., Mercer University Press, 1997)
- minorityThe command originally targets the magical or coercive exploitation of the divine name in incantation, the misuse of the name as a force to compel. This reading has roots in the history-of-religions school and is supported from the Mesopotamian incantation texts, where human affliction is tied to violating an oath-curse sworn in a god's name. Most current critics fold it into the broad-misuse reading rather than holding it as the sole original sense.; Markham J. Geller, 'The Šurpu Incantations and Lev. V.1-5,' Journal of Semitic Studies 25 (1980): 181-192; Karel van der Toorn, Sin and Sanction in Israel and Mesopotamia (Studia Semitica Neerlandica 22, 1985)
- minorityThe prohibition reaches any pointless or needless utterance of the Name, beyond the false oath proper. This is the peshat extension of the classical Jewish tradition: Ramban broadens it to any frivolous use of the honored Name, and Maimonides, via the Talmud, extends it even to pronouncing an unnecessary blessing. "In vain" here means "for nothing." The whole classical Jewish tradition nonetheless reads the verb on the verbal or utterance axis, not the bearing axis.; Ramban (Nachmanides), Commentary on Exodus 20:7; Maimonides, Sefer ha-Mitzvot, negative commandment 62; Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Shevuot 1:4-7; Ibn Ezra, Commentary on Exodus 20:7
- minorityThe verb keeps its ordinary sense "lift, carry, bear" and is not shorthand for an oath: Israel, branded with YHWH's name as his covenant possession, must not bear that name worthlessly by misrepresenting him, on the model of the high priest who physically bears the engraved divine name. The strongest support is that this verb joined to "name" appears elsewhere in these books only of the priest literally wearing the names (Exodus 28:12, 29, 38), set within the priestly material that surrounds the commandments and a wider network of texts where Israel is "called by" or marked with God's name; and that where Hebrew clearly means "utter," it specifies the lips (Psalm 16:4; Psalm 50:16, the covenant taken up on the mouth) or the oath itself (1 Kings 8:31) as the object, which the bare command does not. On this reading "in vain" is ethical: to carry the name for nothing is to claim God while one's life points elsewhere. Even critics who reject the overall case concede the lexical force of the priest literally wearing the engraved name, the one plank of the argument that has not been effectively answered. A further support drawn from the ancient Near East is that the standard Mesopotamian oath formula puts the words for "oath" or "life," not "name," under the verb, so joining this verb directly to "name" is not the clean borrowing of an oath idiom that the speech reading assumes. The reading has reshaped evangelical biblical theology since 2011 but has not been adopted by any post-2018 critical Exodus or Deuteronomy commentary in the European mainstream.; Daniel I. Block, 'Bearing the Name of the LORD with Honor,' Bibliotheca Sacra 168 (2011): 20-31; Carmen Joy Imes, Bearing YHWH's Name at Sinai: A Reexamination of the Name Command of the Decalogue (BBRSup 19; Eisenbrauns, 2018)
- contestedThe bearing reading overreaches and is barely reconcilable with Hebrew usage. Psalm 24:4 pairs this verb with "in vain" in plain parallel with "swear deceitfully," and a neighboring command uses the verb with the same word of spreading a false report, both clearly about speech; a sense drawn from the priestly account of the high priest's garments cannot simply be transferred into a command of a different kind; and the synchronic method bypasses the cultic and legal setting (Lev 19:12; Zech 5:3-4) where the prohibition arguably took shape. The traditional oath or broad-speech reading should stand.; Eckart Otto, review of Carmen Joy Imes, Bearing YHWH's Name at Sinai, Zeitschrift für Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte 24 (2018): 329-330