anah

At its heart this word is about pressing a person down. Someone strong does it to someone weak, and the weaker one is bent under it. It covers a wide range of that pressing: hard labor forced on slaves, an enemy grinding down a nation, a man overpowering a woman, and the suffering God himself sends to discipline or to test. The common thread is not the particular hurt but the relationship of power: one party is lowered, and usually another party does the lowering.

Because the lowering can be done to oneself, the same word names a deliberate religious act: humbling yourself, especially by fasting and self-denial on Israel's solemn days. Here a person willingly takes the low place before God rather than being forced into it. The Bible treats this self-humbling as the right response to God, the mirror image of the wrongful crushing that the powerful inflict on the weak.

The word also turns inward and becomes simply being brought low: a song silenced, a roar that does not flinch, sheep wandering beaten down with no shepherd, a sufferer worn thin. So the one word holds both sides of the act. To read any single verse rightly you have to ask who is pressing whom down, and whether the lowering is cruelty, discipline, or a person bowing low on purpose.

This is a different word that happens to be spelled the same. It appears only in Ecclesiastes, where the Preacher speaks of the work, the task, that God has given people to be busy with. It does not carry the idea of suffering or being pressed down; it simply means to be occupied, kept busy, engaged in an activity.

The standard lexicons list this as a separate root from the common word for afflicting and humbling. Translators sometimes blur the two, because hard, wearying work can feel like affliction, but the Preacher's point is about the labor God assigns, not about being crushed by it.