affliction: the hard, lowered condition of someone weighed down by suffering, oppression, or want
This word names a state of being brought low. It grows out of a verb meaning to be bowed down or humbled, so it does not describe suffering at arm's length; it describes a person pressed under a weight, whether that weight is an enemy, a hard circumstance, or plain misery. English Bibles reach for several words to catch it: affliction, misery, trouble, distress, and sometimes poverty, because no single English word carries the whole load.
The range runs from public oppression to private grief without changing its core. It covers Israel crushed under slavery in Egypt, an individual worn down by illness or enemies, and the wretchedness a sufferer looks back on in a lament. In every case the sense is the same: a life bent low by hardship.
A thread that runs through many of these verses is that this affliction is something God notices. Again and again the text says that the LORD saw, heard, or looked upon a person's affliction and then acted. The word itself does not mean God's attention, but it is the condition that repeatedly draws it, which is why it sits at the heart of some of the Bible's central rescue stories.