tsayid

This word names both sides of the hunt at once: the skill and activity of tracking wild animals, and the catch that results, the wild meat carried home to be cooked and eaten. Hebrew keeps the two together in a single word, so which side is in view depends on the sentence. When a person is called mighty or skilled at it, the activity is meant; when it is eaten or brought to a father, the game itself is meant.

Almost every occurrence sits in two stories. Nimrod is "a mighty hunter" at the dawn of the nations, and Esau is "a man who knew hunting," the brother whose wild game his father Isaac loved to eat. In the drama of the stolen blessing the word drums through the chapter as Isaac asks for game, Esau goes out to catch it, and Jacob arrives with a substitute dish.

The Bible's picture of the hunter is pointed. The two men who carry this word, Nimrod and Esau, stand at the edges of the covenant people, set in deliberate contrast to the shepherds, from Abel to David, whom the Bible holds up as its leaders. Related Hebrew words fill out the scene: the matching verb צוד, to hunt or chase, and טֶרֶף, the torn prey a wild predator rips from its kill.

Beyond the hunt, the same word widens to mean food in general, the supply a person lays up or carries along. The link is natural: what a hunter catches is what a household eats, so the word for the catch becomes a word for the larder.

When the Gibeonites trick Joshua, they show off worn-out, moldy "provisions" to prove they have traveled a long way. In a complaint about Sabbath trade the word covers ordinary market food, and in a psalm God promises to bless Zion's "provisions." A related Hebrew word, צֵידָה, carries this same idea of food packed for the road.

Scholars disagree about whether this "provisions" sense grew out of the hunting sense or began as a separate look-alike word that later merged with it. Either way, by the time of these passages the word simply means food-supply, with the hunt left far behind.