to ransom: to free a person or thing held by another by handing over a substitute in its place
At its root this is a word from the world of buying and selling. To pdh someone is to get them out of a claim that holds them, by giving something of equal worth instead. The picture always has three parts: the one held, the one who holds them, and the price that buys them loose. That three-cornered shape is what sets this word apart from a plain word for setting free.
In the laws of Israel the price is real and named.
- A firstborn donkey is bought back with a sheep
- a firstborn son with five pieces of silver
- an enslaved woman with a payment from her family
The word here is precise and commercial: a fixed amount changes hands and a claim is discharged.
The deeper uses keep the shape of a ransom but quietly drop the price. When God is the one who ransoms, no payment is ever mentioned and no captor is ever paid: God brings Israel out of Egypt, and rescues a trapped or dying person, by sheer power and grace. The writers knew the commercial force of the word and chose to keep it while emptying it of money, so that twice they say outright that this redemption costs no silver at all. At its highest reach the word stretches all the way to rescue from sin itself.
These are shades of one idea, not separate words, so they are gathered under a single meaning. The senses below run from the literal price of the law to the moneyless rescue of the Psalms and prophets.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether this verb always carries the idea of a literal price, even when God is the one redeeming.
- minorityThe price-idea is built into the word and never fully disappears; when God redeems, the cost is borne in his power, judgment, and covenant honor rather than in silver.; Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, 3rd ed. (Eerdmans, 1965), 11-48; B. B. Warfield, 'The New Testament Terminology of Redemption,' Princeton Theological Review 15 (1917): 201-249
- majorityIn contexts with God as subject the price-component has been deliberately set aside; God ransoms by grace, and no payment or recipient is ever named.; J. J. Stamm, 'pdh,' Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament (Hendrickson, 1997), 2:964-976; David Hill, Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings, SNTSMS 5 (Cambridge UP, 1967), 49-81; Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy, JPS Torah Commentary (JPS, 1996), 86-87
- contestedThe legal shape of the act stays fully in force even with no money named: the redemption still establishes a claim and an obligation, but the payment is reconfigured as the exercise of divine power.; David Daube, The Exodus Pattern in the Bible (Faber & Faber, 1963), 11-61; Bernard M. Levinson, 'The Manumission of Hermeneutics,' Congress Volume Leiden 2004, VTSup 109 (Brill, 2006), 281-324