ataph

Most often this verb describes strength draining away. In its plainest use it marks the physically weaker animals of a flock, the ones too feeble to keep up. But its home is Hebrew poetry, where again and again someone cries that their spirit or their very life faints, grows limp, or is overwhelmed inside them.

The picture is of the inner self going slack, as if wrapped up and muffled by grief, fear, or exhaustion. It is not a quiet tiredness but a collapse: children fainting in the streets for hunger, a soul giving way as trouble closes in. A close cousin (עָלַף) carries the same double life of wrapping and swooning, and the ordinary word for growing numb (פּוּג) sits nearby.

Because this spelling can also mean to wrap or cover, some scholars think the fainting sense grew out of that: to faint is to be enveloped, closed over by weakness.

In this use the verb describes one thing wrapping or clothing another so that it is completely covered. Valleys "clothe themselves" with grain, decked out like someone dressed in fine clothing; violence is worn by the arrogant like a garment draped over them.

The image is not a thin layer laid on top but a full enveloping, the way a robe surrounds the body. Hebrew has an almost identical-looking verb (עָטָה) for wrapping oneself in a cloak, and the common words for covering (כָּסָה) and clothing (לָבַשׁ) stand close by.

This meaning rests on a single, difficult line. Job, searching for God, says that when God "turns" to one side he cannot catch sight of him. Whether the word here means to turn away, or to hide and wrap himself out of view, is genuinely unsettled, and translations divide over it.

Because the word carries this sense only this once, its meaning here is reconstructed rather than certain.