neshekh

• Stands on its own as the whole charge. The basic loan laws and the portrait of the upright worshipper forbid it with no companion word beside it, so it alone can name the offense by itself.Exo 22:25Deu 23:19Psa 15:5
• Attaches to the handing over of the loan itself: money is "given" at this charge, or the charge is "laid on" the borrower, so the word describes the terms the lender sets as the loan goes out.Exo 22:25Lev 25:37Psa 15:5
• Is spelled out across every kind of loan, not only cash: the law bans it on silver, on food, and on anything whatever that is lent out.Deu 23:19Lev 25:37
• Comes from the word for biting, so it pictures the charge as a bite taken out of the borrower, which is why English versions often render it "usury"; the command against it sits inside instructions about the poor neighbor who needs the loan.Exo 22:25Lev 25:37

• Named together as a single prohibition on lending to a fellow Israelite, so that a brother who has run short can keep living alongside the lender.Lev 25:36
• Both count in the reckoning of who is just and who is guilty: the man who refuses them lives, and the man who takes them is put to death for it.Ezk 18:17Ezk 18:13
• Both are named as ways of piling up wealth at a poor neighbor's expense, listed beside bribery and extortion rather than treated as ordinary business.Pro 28:8Ezk 22:12
• Scholars still differ over whether the two mark genuinely separate charges or work as a fixed pair meaning interest of any sort. The evidence is thin either way: no verse defines either word, one of them does turn up alone, and the other never appears without its partner.Ezk 18:8

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• This is the fixed legal term for the charge a lender takes for the loan itself, banned toward a fellow Israelite whether what is lent is silver, food, or anything else (Exodus 22:25; Deuteronomy 23:19).Exo 22:25Deu 23:19
• It works as a test of an upright life, listed among the things a righteous person simply does not do: he does not put out his silver at interest (Psalm 15:5; Ezekiel 18:8).Psa 15:5Ezk 18:8
• It names gain that comes under judgment and does not last: a fortune built this way passes to someone who will be generous to the poor (Proverbs 28:8), and taking it stands in the charge sheet against Jerusalem (Ezekiel 22:12).Pro 28:8Ezk 22:12

• In the single law where both words appear they stand side by side as the two ways a lender may squeeze a loan to a neighbor in need: no charge added to the silver he hands over, and no extra required back on the food he supplies (Leviticus 25:37).Lev 25:37

• Away from the one lending law, this word has nothing to do with loans at all: it names the greater part or bulk of a group, as when most of Benjamin had stayed on duty for Saul's house (1 Chronicles 12:29), and when a great part of the people had not purified themselves before eating the Passover (2 Chronicles 30:18).1Ch 12:292Ch 30:18
• It can measure sheer scale or abundance rather than any sum owed: the queen of Sheba found that not even half of the "greatness" of Solomon's wisdom had been reported to her (2 Chronicles 9:6).2Ch 9:6
• It also covers natural growth, what a household produces and raises: Eli is warned that everything his house brings up will die young (1 Samuel 2:33).1Sa 2:33

• Only this word names the extra amount itself, the thing that changes hands. Silver is handed over "at" it, and it is what a lender must not take from a poor neighbor.Exo 22:25Lev 25:36Lev 25:37Psa 15:5
• Only this word stands beside a second term for profit, usually rendered "increase", in a fixed legal pairing. That pairing marks it as one named kind of gain among others, which the verb never is.Lev 25:36Pro 28:8Ezk 18:8Ezk 22:12
• Only this word appears in the checklists that weigh a whole life. Refusing it is one of the marks of the man who will never be shaken, and taking it is listed among the deeds for which a man dies while the man who refuses it lives.Psa 15:5Ezk 18:13Ezk 18:17

• The two meet in one sentence in the law on lending, where the verb is the charging and the noun is what is charged: do not charge your brother, no charge on silver, on food, on anything that gets charged. They are the two sides of a single transaction.Deu 23:19
• Both are held inside the same body of law protecting a fellow Israelite in need, so both frame a lender's gain as harm done to a brother rather than as ordinary business.Deu 23:20Lev 25:36Lev 25:37
• Both carry the same underlying image of a bite. Hebrew names the lender's gain with the word it uses for a snake's strike, so the charge on a loan is spoken of as something that sinks its teeth into the borrower.Hab 2:7Deu 23:19

• Only this word describes a real bite. It is what a snake does to a heel, to a traveler, to a man repairing a wall, and what the venomous serpents did to Israel in the wilderness. The other word never names an actual bite anywhere in the Bible.Gen 49:17Num 21:6Num 21:9Ecc 10:8Ecc 10:11Amo 5:19Jer 8:17
• Only this word names the act of lending at a charge, something a person does to another person. That is why it can be forbidden in one case and allowed in another: never toward a fellow Israelite, permitted toward a foreigner.Deu 23:20
• Only this word turns the bite into a picture of what people do to each other: prophets who bite with their teeth and then announce peace, and the sudden rising of those who will bite the plunderer who stripped them.Mic 3:5Hab 2:7
• Only this word can be stretched to something that is not a creature at all: wine that bites like a snake at the end of a long night of drinking.Pro 23:32