pashat

At its core this word means to peel a covering away. Most often that covering is clothing: a person takes off their own robe, or someone forcibly pulls the clothes off another. It is the everyday word for undressing, but in the Bible it is rarely neutral, because removing someone's clothing is usually an act of either ritual change or violence.

The same motion reaches further than cloth. Used of an animal, it means to skin it, peeling the hide off a carcass for sacrifice. Used of a fallen soldier, it means to strip the body of its armor and valuables after a battle. And used as a threat, it pictures a person or city left exposed and shamed, with everything that covered and protected them torn away.

What ties these uses together is the single image of pulling off an outer layer to leave what was underneath bare. Whether the covering is a garment, a hide, or the dignity of a defeated enemy, the action and the result are the same: the covering comes off, and what it hid is uncovered.

In this use the word names a military move: a band of fighters dashes forward and falls upon a target, fanning out across the countryside to seize whatever they can. It is the standard term for a raiding party, the swift attack that pounces on towns or fields rather than the set-piece battle of two armies in formation.

The picture is one of sudden, spreading motion. A force breaks out from where it was waiting and overruns the land, scattering across it the way attackers swarm a place they mean to loot. It almost always appears with a word for the place or people being fallen upon, which is what marks it as an assault rather than ordinary movement.

This sense and the sense of stripping clothes share a single root idea of breaking out or spreading apart, and some scholars connect them through the thought of a force bursting open across the land. But by the time the word is used this way it functions as its own meaning, a fixed term for raiding that a reader handles as a separate idea.