nataḥ

This verb names one specific step in butchering: taking a body that is already dead and dividing it at the joints into its separate parts. The killing is a different word (שָׁחַט), and so is splitting a carcass down the middle into two matching halves (בָּתַר). Here the body comes apart into a set of pieces (נֵתַח) that can be counted, carried, and laid out, and in the instructions for offerings the verb and that noun sit side by side in a fixed phrase, "cut it into its pieces."

Six of the nine uses stand at an altar. The instructions for a whole burnt offering are unhurried and physical: skin the animal, cut it into its pieces, then arrange the pieces with the head and the fat on the wood over the fire. Elijah asks for the same procedure on Mount Carmel and then carries it out himself on the bull he lays on his own altar. Dividing the body is not merely getting ready for the offering. It is how a whole animal is accounted for part by part before it is handed over.

The other three uses carry the butcher's word out of the sanctuary, and the shock is the point.

• In Judges a man takes a knife to his dead concubine, divides her at the bones into twelve pieces, and sends them through the whole territory of Israel.
• Recounting the deed before the assembled tribes, he reaches for this same butchering verb rather than a gentler one.
• Saul cuts a pair of oxen apart and sends the pieces out by messenger, warning that the herds of anyone who will not follow him will be handled the same way.

In all three, the cutting is followed immediately by sending: a divided body travels through the country, and every town that receives a piece is being called to answer for it. The verb itself, though, names an action and not a rite. It describes what a blade does to a carcass, which is why one word can serve both the altar and the atrocity, and why neither scene turns into the other.