paqad

At its heart this word is not about a feeling but about a decision that leads to action. Someone in authority fixes attention on a person or group, sizes up their situation, and then does something about it. The same single word can mean rescue or ruin, because what makes it this word is the deliberate turning toward someone with intent to act, not whether the result is kind or harsh. When God is the subject, the word is directional, not moral: it names a purposeful drawing near, and the situation alone tells you whether the outcome is blessing or judgment. The same word brings Sarah a son and Babylon its downfall.

When God acts and the person is in need, it means he draws near to help: he keeps a long promise, sends a child to a barren woman, or comes to rescue a captive people. Older translations render this as "visit," in the sense of paying attention to someone in order to do them good. The book of Genesis sets the tone, and Joseph's dying pledge that God will surely come to bring Israel up out of Egypt becomes a watchword for the rescue at the heart of Exodus.

When the person has done wrong, the very same word turns to settling accounts: God or a ruler steps in to call the offense to account. The prophets make this the language of the coming reckoning, the day when God arrives to deal with sin, so that in their books the word is most often a threat rather than a comfort. Context, not the word itself, tells you whether the stepping-in is for good or for ill, which is exactly why one verse can sound tender and the next severe.

The care side and the punishment side are listed here as two senses of one underlying idea. Whether they should be split into separate words, and how to read the heavy phrase in which God deals with the sins of one generation in the lives of the next, are genuine scholarly questions, recorded below.

This is the word for going down a line of people and accounting for each one, usually to know how many can serve. It runs through the camp registers of the book of Numbers, where each tribe's count is recorded, and through the army stories where a commander calls up his troops and reviews them before battle. The Greek title of the book of Numbers comes straight from this concentration of the word.

The plain form that means "the people who were counted," often translated "those who were numbered," appears dozens of times in the census lists. It is the same act whether the goal is taxation, temple service, or war: someone passes through a group and registers every member. In a few places this counting is treated as dangerous: the census in Exodus requires each man to pay a ransom for his life precisely because being counted exposes a person to risk.

This sense is close to the word's general idea of attending to people, but here the attending takes one fixed shape, an orderly head count, so a reader needs the separate English word "number" or "muster" to follow it.

Here the word means handing someone a job and the authority to do it.

• A master sets a trusted servant over his whole household
• a king appoints officers over a district or over the temple work
• a prophet is set over nations and kingdoms to speak for God

This is the sense that dominates the books written after the exile, where the noun for an appointed official becomes a standard administrative term, and the Hebrew Bible ends with a Persian king announcing that the Lord has charged him to build a temple.

The difference from simply attending to people is that this names the act of installing a person in a post. The one appointed is given a charge to keep, and that charge belongs to them from then on.

This sense overlaps with the next one, entrusting something to a person's care, and in some verses the line between appointing a person and depositing goods with them is thin. The two are kept separate here because one puts a person over a task and the other places an object in their keeping.

This is the storing-and-handing-over side of the word. Things are deposited with a trusted person:

• silver collected for the temple repairs is handed to the workers
• goods are left in a neighbor's keeping
• supplies are stored away

In its strongest moment a person commits their own life into God's hands for safekeeping, the line later taken up on the cross.

Unlike putting a person in charge of a job, this puts an object or a trust into someone's care, to be kept and answered for later. The two ideas grow from the same underlying picture of placing something where it belongs and holding the keeper responsible. This handing-over sense is also where the noun for the precepts of God comes from: the commands are pictured as instructions entrusted to his people for keeping.

This is the counting word turned around to its result. After people are mustered or a group is tallied, this form reports who is absent.

• A captain checks his men and finds none missing
• a seat at the table is empty and the person is noted as gone
• an inventory turns up a shortfall

It is the flip side of numbering people: where one form does the counting, this one reports the gap the count reveals. That is why it is the same word, and why English needs the separate idea of being "missing" or "lacking" to carry it. This is also the pole the Arabic relative of the word preserves, where the word means "to lose or miss something."