alal

This verb pictures a stronger party working its will on someone weaker, treating the other as an object to be dealt with however the actor pleases. The tone is set entirely by who is acting and why. When God is the actor, English Bibles reach for "afflict" or "deal severely with," as in the poems of Lamentations, where Jerusalem cries that the Lord has dealt harshly with her.

When a person is the actor, the verb turns cruel and often contemptuous. It covers making a fool of someone (Balaam complains that his donkey has made sport of him), one nation mocking another (as Egypt was mocked in the exodus), and at its darkest the violent abuse of a helpless victim (the horror of Judges 19). The same word can also fold back on the actor, describing a person who busies himself with wicked deeds.

What holds these uses together is not a fixed moral color but a fixed relationship: one side imposes, the other is imposed upon. It sits close to ענה, the ordinary word for afflicting or humbling, but leans harder toward wanton, willful treatment than toward simple oppression.

Here the same string of letters describes a farmer's second pass over a vineyard or olive grove: after the main harvest, going back to strip off whatever fruit is left. Israel's law turned this into an act of mercy, forbidding owners from picking their vines completely bare so that the poor and the foreigner could take what remained.

The prophets seize the darker side of the image. To glean a people is to come back through them and pick off the survivors until nothing is left, which is how the word describes both a slaughter in Judges and God's threat to strip Israel like a vine in Jeremiah. It is a near-neighbor of לקט, the poor person's gathering of dropped grain, but where that word stoops to pick up leftovers, this one deliberately goes back to take them.

This sense appears only once, in Job's lament that he has put on sackcloth and done something with his horn, his symbol of strength and dignity, down in the dust. Translators divide over whether the verb means he has thrust or laid his horn in the dust or that he has defiled it there. Either way the picture is one of self-abasement, Job's former standing dragged down into the dirt. Because the word is used this way nowhere else, its exact force cannot be recovered with confidence.