savav

At its root this word is about a change of direction. A person stops facing or heading one way and turns to face or head another: Joseph turns away from his brothers to weep, Samuel turns to leave, a dying king turns his face to the wall, a king turns to face the assembly and bless them. The same motion belongs to a journey that does not go straight but bends around an obstacle, a territory, or a people.

The geographic uses are the quiet, technical end of this: a tribal boundary line is described as turning, bending around a hill or a spring as a surveyor would trace it. The image is identical to a person turning, just applied to a line on the land instead of a body. Even a river can turn back, as when the poet pictures the Jordan reversing its course.

What holds these together is the simple act of veering off a straight line. It is the everyday, literal core from which the word's grander senses (circling something, surrounding it) grow.

Here the turning becomes a full path around something. A person or group walks a circuit: Israel marches around Jericho once a day and seven times on the seventh, a worshiper circles the altar, Samuel makes his yearly round of the towns where he judges, watchmen make their rounds of the city, and a river is pictured winding around a whole land. The motion is repeatable and deliberate, a loop rather than a single veer.

The same word describes a thing that physically runs all the way around another: the decorative gourds and the molten basin in Solomon's temple are said to go around the rim, and engraved stones are framed all around with settings of gold. And it covers nature's great cycles, the wind that turns round and round and returns again on its circuits.

What unites them is the closed loop: the path or the object comes back to where it began, encircling its center.

When the circle closes in on a target, the word means to surround. Most often the surrounding is hostile: an enemy ring around a city, a mob pressing around a house at night, attackers hemming in a single person so there is no escape, floodwaters engulfing a drowning man. The psalms use it again and again for the experience of being encircled by foes, by the cords of death, by trouble on every side.

But the same closing-in can be a comfort. God surrounds the one who trusts him with steadfast love, and shields the faithful with songs of deliverance, so the ring becomes protection rather than menace. The word itself does not decide which it is; the context does.

The difference from simply going around something is the intent and the closing pressure. To surround is to encircle so as to trap and overwhelm, or to enclose and guard. The center is no longer a landmark to pass but a thing held fast on every side.

When the turning is done to a thing rather than by a person, the word means to turn it over in the sense of handing it on or altering it. A kingdom is turned over from one man to another, an inheritance may not be shifted from one tribe to another, houses pass into the hands of strangers, the ark is carried about from town to town, a king turns the people's hearts back to himself, a defeated king's name is changed to a new one. The mover causes a transfer or a transformation.

This sense grows naturally from the basic idea of turning: to make a thing face a new direction is, by extension, to put it into new hands or a new state. The object does not move itself; someone turns it.

It is the word at its most figurative, used for shifts of loyalty, ownership, identity, and the course of events.