tsahal

Underneath this word is the sound a horse makes. Jeremiah uses it plainly of well fed stallions, and then of men who chase after their neighbors' wives with the same abandon. It names a high, carrying sound that is forced out of a body too full of feeling to stay quiet.

The prophets hand that same sound to people, and there it usually becomes joy. It rarely stands alone: it is paired with the ringing cry of celebration (רָנַן) in Isaiah and Jeremiah, and with plain gladness (שָׂמַח) when the city of Susa erupts at Mordecai's honoring. The partner word supplies the emotion; this word supplies the volume. Unlike the massed shout of an army or a crowd (רוּעַ), it is a single voice pitched high enough to carry.

So the feeling behind the cry comes from the setting rather than from the word itself:

• joy loud enough for a whole city to hear
• the raw cry of animals, and of people behaving like them
• a shriek of alarm as an invading army comes down the road

That is why English Bibles need so many different verbs for it. A translator has to decide what the crier is feeling before choosing a word, because the Hebrew leaves that to the context.

This is a second word that happens to be spelled exactly like the verb for crying out, and it has nothing to do with sound. It shows up once, in a psalm's short list of what God grows out of the ground for people: wine that gladdens the heart, oil that makes the face shine, and bread that keeps a person going.

The picture is an ordinary one. Olive oil rubbed into skin left it visibly gleaming, and a gleaming face was the look of someone well fed, well cared for, and at ease. The line is describing how a person looks, not directly how a person feels, though in the psalm the two plainly travel together.

Nothing else in the Hebrew Bible uses the word this way, so everything known about it comes from that one line and from the family of Hebrew words for the blaze of noon and for fresh oil, which share its consonants.