arakh

The basic picture is a person placing things deliberately, one by one, into the arrangement they are meant to have. It is hands-on, orderly work, not a vague tidying. You see it in priests laying split wood across an altar, in setting a row of bread or a row of lamps in the holy place, and in spreading a table for guests.

From that physical core the word stretches naturally to anything that is set out in deliberate order. An army is "laid out" when its ranks are drawn up facing the enemy, so the word becomes the standard term for forming a battle line. Words are "laid out" when a speaker marshals an argument or a legal case point by point. And two things are "set side by side" when they are measured against each other, which gives the word its sense of comparing, and (almost always in the negative) of being a match for someone.

The thread running through all of these is arrangement toward a purpose: items placed in a fixed order so they are ready for use, for worship, for battle, or for judgment. The shade of meaning shifts with what is being arranged, but the action is the same deliberate setting-in-order.

This is a specialized money word built from the noun for an assessed amount. It is what a priest does when he names the fixed sum a person, an animal, or a house is worth for a vow, and what a ruler does when he sets the tax a country must pay. The action is naming an exact figure, not haggling toward one.

Standard lexicons treat this as a separate verb from the ordinary word for arranging, because it works differently in the grammar and always carries this fiscal sense of putting a number on something. It is kept apart here for that reason, though the two share a root idea of fixing a thing's place: one fixes where an object goes, the other fixes what it is worth.