natan

This is one of the busiest verbs in the Hebrew Bible, and nearly all of its huge English range grows from a single picture: causing something to leave the giver and arrive somewhere else, in someone's hand, in a place, in a new condition. Once you see that one motion, the long list of English translations stops looking like separate words and starts looking like the same act aimed in different directions.

Aimed at a person, it is to give: a gift, a blessing, a daughter in marriage, a payment, or an enemy handed over into your power. Aimed at a place, it is to put, set, or lay something down. Aimed at a thing's identity, it is to make or appoint it into something it was not before. Aimed at a person's freedom to act, it is to let or allow. Aimed outward as sound, it is to lift up the voice, to cry out or roar.

The senses below sort these directions. They are not competing definitions of different words: they are the same giving, traced to where the thing given lands. Because the verb is so general, the English word a translation picks is chosen entirely by what is being handed over and to whom, which is why one Hebrew word becomes dozens of English ones.