iqqer

When a farmer pulls a plant up, the roots come with it. That is the picture here. This is not cutting a stalk off at ground level, which leaves a stump that can sprout again, but taking the whole thing out of the soil so that nothing is left to grow back.

Ecclesiastes uses the word in its plainest setting, pairing it with planting inside a long list of opposites that together cover the whole of a life. Zephaniah stretches the same picture over a city, because a town can be torn out of its place as thoroughly as a vine out of a field. Hebrew has a weightier word for that kind of judgment, and the prophets usually reach for נָתַשׁ when they announce that God will pull a nation out of its land. This word stays closer to the garden.

The same image lies behind the related adjective for a woman or animal that bears no young (עָקָר): a family line pictured as cut off at the root, with nothing growing up from it.

An army that captured horses and chariots could not always keep them, and killing the animals was not the only option. Cutting the large tendon at the back of a horse's hind leg left it alive but permanently useless in battle. That is what this word names: a deliberate, irreversible crippling, done to an animal rather than to a person.

The Bible weighs the act three different ways.

• In Jacob's deathbed poem it is an outburst of blind rage, and he curses it.
• In Joshua's northern campaign God commands it, so that Israel will not start trusting captured chariots instead of trusting him.
• After David defeats Hadadezer he does it to nearly every captured chariot team but holds a hundred back, and the narrator lets that exception stand without comment.

What ties this to the other meaning is the idea of a root. The tendon sits where the leg joins and draws its strength, the root of the limb, so cutting there is its own kind of uprooting.