avar

This is the everyday meaning, and the great bulk of the word's uses sit here. The picture is always the same: someone or something is on one side of a line and ends up on the other, or moves past a fixed point. The line can be a river, a border, a person standing in the road, or simply the place where you were a moment ago.

The shades all grow out of that one picture. Crossing a river or a boundary is the strong form, used again and again for Israel crossing the Jordan into the land. Passing by is the same motion seen from the side of the thing left behind, which is why a passerby and a thing that slips out of sight are both named with this word. Passing through is the motion seen as going into and out the far side of a place.

From physical movement the word stretches naturally to time and to things that do not last. A day, a season, or a life can pass over and be gone, so the word also carries the sense of vanishing or being over. Wind, water, and trouble pass over a person the same way, sometimes sweeping them away. The reader should let context decide whether the motion is across a place, past a point, or away into nothing.

When the thing crossed is not a river but a rule, the word means to violate it. The image is exact: a command or covenant is a line drawn by God, and to step over that line is to break faith. English Bibles usually render this as transgress.

This is not a separate word from the ordinary verb. It is the same motion of crossing a boundary, applied to a moral or legal boundary instead of a physical one. The clue is almost always an object like covenant, command, mouth (meaning a spoken order), or oath standing right beside the verb. Where that object is missing, the verse is simply describing movement, not sin.

When the verb is causative, the subject does not cross over but makes someone or something else cross. The same range follows: a person can be brought across a river, an army or possessions can be sent over, a proclamation can be made to pass through a land, a guilt can be taken away, and an inheritance can be handed over to someone new.

One use of this causative form needs special care. Several texts speak of making a son or daughter pass through the fire, an act tied to the worship of Molech and condemned as detestable. The verb itself only means to make pass through; the horror is in what it describes, and the texts treat it as a grave sin rather than a neutral ritual.

A small group of texts use a reflexive form of this root to describe overflowing anger, whether God's fury against his people or a king's rage that a wise person learns not to provoke. Many scholars treat this as a separate root that happens to be spelled the same, since the meaning is anger rather than motion.

Whether it is a distinct word or a vivid stretch of the crossing image, the effect is the same: wrath that overflows its banks like a river in flood and crosses every boundary. It is rare, it always concerns anger, and it should not be confused with the ordinary verb for crossing or passing.