atsav

This is the Bible's main word for deep inner pain. At its center is grief: the ache of loss, disappointment, or betrayal that settles in the heart. But the same word stretches in three directions that belong together.

• It can mean to feel that grief oneself, as when Jacob's sons burn with sorrow and anger, or when God himself is grieved to his heart.
• It can mean to inflict that grief on another, to wound, vex, or displease someone, most strikingly when Israel grieves God in the wilderness and grieves his Holy Spirit.
• It can even reach a physical injury, the hurt of a worker gashed by the stones he quarries.

What holds these together is that the pain is rarely just physical or just private. It is relational: grief over a broken bond, hurt that passes between people, and, remarkably, pain that people can cause God. Hebrew has other words for sorrow and hurt, such as כאב for feeling pain and אבל for open mourning, but this word carries the extra note of grief mixed with the sense that something has gone wrong.

A second, much rarer use of these same three letters has nothing to do with pain. It means to shape or fashion something by hand, the way a craftsman forms a figure. Job says to God, "your hands shaped me and made me," picturing the Maker as an artisan molding a person. In Jeremiah the word describes shaping cakes into the image of a goddess.

Many scholars think this is actually a separate word that only happens to be spelled the same, related to the Hebrew word for a carved idol. Whether it is a different word or a distant branch of the same one, its meaning here is plainly craftsmanship, not sorrow. (The modern Hebrew word for "design" comes straight from this sense.)