to press hard on someone until there is no room left: to hem in, harass, or wear down by relentless pressure
The picture behind this word is a space closing in. Something or someone bears down until the person under pressure has nowhere left to go and no choice left to make. Hebrew already has an ordinary verb for laying siege to a city (צוּר); this one names what a siege does to the people trapped inside it, and four of the bleakest verses in the Bible set it beside the nouns for "siege" and "distress" in a single breath.
The same verb covers pressure that comes from very different directions:
- an enemy army squeezing a walled city until its people are starving
- a woman weeping and asking day after day until a man surrenders his secret
- a conviction rising inside a man that will not let him keep quiet
What holds these together is not where the pressure comes from but what it does: the one being pressed runs out of room. That is why English Bibles rotate through "distress", "besiege", "oppress", "press", "urge" and "compel" without any one of them being wrong.
The hardest use to sit with is Isaiah 29:2, where God says that he himself will bear down on Jerusalem. Everywhere else the word names what enemies do; here the squeeze comes from the God the city counted on for protection.