patah

This is the plain, physical side of the word: to widen something or open up room for it. It surfaces only once, in the blessing over Noah's son Japheth, where God is asked to make wide the space Japheth's descendants will occupy. The line is built as a play on the name Japheth itself, so the sound of the name and the word for enlarging echo each other.

Many scholars see this spacious, open sense as the root idea behind everything else the word does. A mind that is wide open is undefended and easily led, and to open someone up is to win them over. Whether the physical sense and the persuasion sense are truly one word or two look-alikes is debated, which is why they are kept as separate meanings here.

The heart of this word is an open, undefended mind. It runs across a whole range of meaning that a single English word cannot hold. At one end it names a person who is simply too open: naive, gullible, easily talked into things, without the sense to resist. In the middle it names being on the receiving end of that: being persuaded, talked around, or misled by someone else. At the far end it names doing it to another person: winning them over, luring them, seducing them, or deceiving them.

What makes the word tricky is that it is not always sinister. It can be honest, even tender: a ruler is won over by patience and gentle speech, and God says he will woo his straying people back by speaking to their heart. But it just as often carries a darker edge: seducing an unmarried girl, coaxing a secret out of a husband, luring a young man into crime, or a lying spirit talked into fooling a king. The tone comes entirely from the situation, not the word.

The word sits at the center of one of the most jarring lines in the prophets, where Jeremiah accuses God of having enticed him into a prophetic ministry that brought him only mockery. There the same word is used both for what was done to him and for the state he was left in, which is why that verse turns up under more than one shade of meaning.