nashaq

This is the ordinary word for kissing in the Hebrew Bible, and almost every time it appears it means a literal kiss. What varies is the reason for the kiss, and the range is wide. Most often it is the warm kiss of family and friends: a father blessing his son, brothers reunited after years apart, a parting kiss between people who may never meet again. The same act can also seal a solemn moment, as when Samuel kisses Saul after anointing him, marking him out as ruler.

Beyond affection, a kiss could express loyalty or submission to someone in authority, which is why the psalmist can command the nations to "kiss the Son" as an act of allegiance. The same gesture, aimed at an idol, becomes an act of false worship: kissing a statue of Baal or blowing a kiss toward the sun and moon were recognized ways of paying homage to a god. In love poetry the kiss is frankly romantic. And once or twice the word turns figurative, as when righteousness and peace are pictured kissing each other, or an honest answer is called a kiss on the lips.

The act is simple; the meaning comes from who is kissing whom and why. Reading the surrounding scene, rather than the single word, is what tells you whether a kiss is tender, ceremonial, devotional, or romantic.

A small group of verses uses a word spelled the same way as the verb for kissing but meaning something quite different: to handle a weapon, or to be armed with one. The phrase is almost always fixed, describing warriors as those who "handle the bow." It names skilled fighters equipped and ready, not a single act of drawing the string.

The same word can also describe things that touch or meet closely. In one prophetic vision the wings of living creatures touch one another, and the verb pictures them joined edge to edge. Because this sense sounds identical to the word for kiss, and because two things touching is not far from two faces meeting in a kiss, scholars debate whether this is truly a separate word or a stretched use of the one for kissing. Either way, in these verses the point is contact and equipping, not affection.

One famous and difficult line belongs here in the judgment of many scholars. When Pharaoh tells Joseph that by his word all the people will do something, the verb is this one, and it has been understood as "be ordered," "submit to," "do homage," or "kiss the ground before." No single reading has won the field.