tsir

This word names a person sent, and the interest always lies in the sending. Someone with authority hands him a message, dispatches him, and waits on the result. He does not speak for himself, and the whole errand rides on him.

Hebrew already had a common word for a messenger (מַלְאָךְ), which covers anyone who carries word, human or heavenly. This word is rarer and narrower: it belongs to formal missions, usually across a border. Isaiah 18:2 sets the two side by side, a nation sending envoys down the river in reed boats while swift messengers are told where to go.

Proverbs turns the figure into a test of character. An unreliable messenger brings disaster home to the one who sent him, while a trustworthy envoy is as welcome as the chill of snow at harvest time. The prophets use the same figure for a summons to war: word has come from the LORD, and an envoy has been sent out among the nations to gather them for battle.

An ancient door did not hang on metal plates. Its upright post ended in a pin that dropped into a socket cut in the threshold, so the whole door swung by turning in place on that one point. This word names the pivot.

It appears exactly once, in a joke about a lazy man: the door turns on its pivot, and the sluggard turns over on his bed. Both go through a great deal of motion, and neither one goes anywhere.

This word is never a general ache. It names pain that arrives in waves and takes hold, the kind that bends a body double and cannot be reasoned with. It always turns up in the plural, because such pain comes as a series and not as a single stab.

Its home is childbirth. When word reached the wife of Phinehas that the ark was captured and her husband dead, the pangs came over her, and she gave birth and died. That is the picture the prophets then borrow for a city hearing news it cannot survive: doubled over like a woman in labor, unable to stand up straight. Isaiah 13:8 and Isaiah 21:3 both make the comparison out loud, and in Isaiah 21:3 the watchman uses the word twice, once of his own pain and once of the labor he likens it to.

Daniel 10:16 stretches it furthest. No birth is in view at all, only a man who has seen something he cannot bear and whose strength drains away. He describes it with the very phrase used of the woman in 1 Samuel 4:19, which is a forceful way of saying his body gave out the way a body gives out in labor.