qaval

The plain use of this verb is taking charge of something passed from one set of hands into another. The priests receive the blood at the altar, the Levites receive the refuse carried out of the temple, and the priests and Levites receive the weighed silver, gold, and vessels for the journey to Jerusalem. In each case someone hands something over and this word names the hands that take it.

From there it widens in three directions:

• David receives the fighting men who come over to his side, welcoming people rather than objects.
• Job says that he and his wife must accept the bad from God as well as the good, and a son is told to accept correction.
• In Esther the Jews take the yearly keeping of Purim upon themselves, which is not passive at all but deliberate, binding consent.

So the one idea running through all of it is welcoming into your own hands, or your own life, what is set before you. Notice how much of the range is about willingness: this word tends to describe someone who receives, accepts, or agrees, not someone who reaches out and grabs.

The word is rare in Hebrew and appears only in the later books: Chronicles, Ezra, Esther, Job, and Proverbs. There it does work that older Hebrew gave to the broad verb for taking (לָקַח) and to the verb for lifting and bearing (נָשָׂא). It matches an ordinary Aramaic verb so closely that most scholars judge it borrowed from Aramaic, and in later Jewish Hebrew it became the standard word for receiving.

This use belongs entirely to the tabernacle: first the instructions, then the report that the work was done. Fifty loops are sewn along the edge of one curtain and fifty along the edge of the next, each loop set straight across from its partner, so that the two panels can be hooked together into one whole. The word describes exactly that facing, answering arrangement.

This is not a stretched figure built on the idea of receiving. Most scholars take facing as the older idea in this word family: a closely related Aramaic word means "in front of, opposite, corresponding to," and the sense of receiving grew out of it, since what you receive is what has been set in front of you. The tabernacle loops keep the plain, physical version of that idea, two things placed to answer each other exactly.