tsarah

This is the Bible's common word for being in deep trouble. It pictures a person hemmed in, pressed, squeezed into a narrow place, and from that picture it covers the whole range of hard straits a person or nation can fall into: war, siege, disaster, sickness, persecution, and the fear and grief that come with them.

The word holds together two sides of the same experience that English often keeps apart. It can name the outward situation, the danger or calamity itself, as in the repeated cry to God in the day of trouble. And it can name the inward feeling, the anguish and anxiety a person carries, as when the heart is in distress. The two are rarely far apart, because the trouble outside is felt as anguish inside.

Because of that cornered, pressing sense, the prophets often reach for it to describe pain so sharp it is compared to a woman in labor: gripping, unavoidable, and beyond the sufferer's control. It is also the word at the heart of many psalms of lament, where the worshiper names the trouble plainly and then calls on God to bring rescue out of it.

In one place the same set of letters carries a sharply different sense: not trouble in general, but a particular person who causes it. A man with two wives created a household in which one wife could become the other's tormentor, and this word names that rival, the co-wife seen as an adversary.

The Bible uses it this way only of Hannah's situation, where Peninnah, the other wife of Elkanah, taunts the childless Hannah year after year. The word is closely tied to the ordinary meaning of distress: the rival is named for the grief she brings, the living embodiment of trouble in the home. Most lexicons treat this as a separate but related word built on the same idea of pressing someone hard.