tsarar

At its root this word is about constriction: something pulled in close and held tight. Spread your hand over a bundle of belongings and tie them shut, and that is this verb. So is wrapping leftover dough in a cloak, or knotting water up inside a garment as a picture of God's power.

From that physical squeeze the word stretches in two directions that still feel like one idea. A space can be this way, too small for what must fit in it, like a bed too short to stretch out on. And a person can be this way, hemmed in until there is no room to move, which is the Hebrew way of saying someone is in deep trouble. The common phrase translated "I am in distress" literally says something like "it is tight for me."

The word can also be turned on someone else: to box a person or a city in, to lay siege, to bring them to the point where they cannot breathe. Whether it is a bundle squeezed shut, a garment too small, a heart in anguish, or an enemy pressing a city, the single thread is the same pressure pulling everything in tight.

Many scholars treat this as a separate word from the verb that means "to be hostile" (the second meaning below), even though the two look identical and sound alike. The overlap is easy to feel: an army that besieges a city both crushes it and hates it. Where the focus is on the crushing pressure, it belongs here.

This is the verb of open enmity. Most often it shows up as a single word for the person on the other side: the foe, the adversary, the one who is set against you. The book of Esther uses it for Haman, named again and again as the enemy of the Jews. The Psalms use it for the writer's attackers, the people closing in on him.

As an action, it means to take a hostile stance toward someone: to come against them, to make trouble for them, to treat them as a foe. God tells Israel to do this to the Midianites after Midian had done it to them. One narrow but vivid use is marrying a second wife who becomes a rival to her sister, a household turned into a place of jealous hostility.

Many scholars list this as a different word from the one that means "to bind" or "to be in distress" (the first meaning above), even though the two are spelled the same and sound the same. The two ideas brush against each other whenever an enemy besieges a city, both crushing it and hating it, but here the heart of the word is the enmity itself, the stance of one person set against another.