adar

This word almost always turns up inside a denial. Something has been counted, and the report comes back that nothing and nobody is absent: not one item of the plunder David recovered, not one of his men who crossed the Jordan, not one star in the night sky. The force of the word lies in the completeness it guarantees, so it belongs to the language of a roll call rather than of vague shortage.

That gives it two directions of use. Most often it looks at a group or a total and finds it whole. But it can also look at something that ought to be present in a community and find it gone, as when honesty goes missing from public life and there is no justice left. In that use what is absent is not an object but a quality, and English usually reaches for "fails" instead of "is missing".

One passage turns the word around and makes people the ones who could have caused a shortage: Solomon's officers supplied his table month by month and let nothing be lacking. The picture is the same, only seen from the side of whoever is responsible for the supply.

The ordinary Hebrew word for lacking (חָסֵר) starts from the person who feels the need. This word starts from the list.

Both times this word carries its farming sense it names the routine work that keeps planted ground productive: going over the soil with a hand tool to break the crust and clear the weeds. Isaiah 7:25 says so in as many words, since the hoe itself (מַעְדֵּר) stands in the same sentence as the verb, and the name of the tool is where the verb comes from.

Isaiah uses the word twice for the same grim purpose. A vineyard that will no longer be pruned or hoed is a vineyard given over to briers, and hillsides people once worked by hand become open range for cattle and sheep. In both places the end of hoeing is a picture of land let go.

This is the rarest of the three words spelled alike here, and it turns up only in the two lists of the fighters who came to Hebron to make David king. Both verses tie it to whole-hearted loyalty: Zebulun's fifty thousand came ready for war and stood with David with no divided heart, and the whole company came to Hebron of one mind.

What the word itself contributes is genuinely uncertain, and the two readings pull in different directions:

• Read one way it means lending support, which fits the loyalty language of both verses and matches a verb for helping in Aramaic, a sister language of Hebrew.
• Read the other way it means falling into formation, which fits the way the second verse attaches the word directly to the battle line, and the fact that the usual word for drawing troops up in order (עָרַךְ) stands a few words earlier in the first.

Modern Bibles divide accordingly, some printing "helped David" and others "could keep rank". Either way the two verses say the same thing about these men: they arrived organised and undivided, which is the point Chronicles is making about how David came to the throne.