to lend to someone and so hold a claim on them: to act as their creditor.
This verb belongs entirely to the lender's side of a loan. The broader loan verb (לָוָה) can describe either party, the one who borrows or the one who supplies the money, but this word only ever describes the one who has put money out and now holds a claim. Isaiah 24:2 lines the two up, creditor and debtor, in a list of the pairs that the coming judgment will flatten.
The word carries a hard edge, and the laws about it are mostly restraints:
- do not act like a creditor toward a poor neighbor (Exodus 22:25)
- do not walk into a debtor's house to seize the security he has put up (Deuteronomy 24:10)
- let every claim go in the seventh year (Deuteronomy 15:2)
Those rules sit beside a separate verb for taking a pledge as security (עָבַט), and the stories show why they were needed. In 2 Kings a widow's creditor arrives to take her two sons as slaves for a debt her dead husband left behind. A psalm's curse asks that a creditor pounce on everything a man owns. Nehemiah found the leading men of his own community doing much the same thing, admitted that he and his people were part of it, and called the practice off.
Jeremiah puts the word to a different use. Complaining that the whole country curses him, he protests that he has neither lent to anyone nor been lent to: no debts in either direction, no money quarrel with a single person, and still nothing but hostility.