to be sick of someone or something: to feel a revulsion built up past the point of bearing it, whether it comes out as disgust or as dread
This verb appears only nine times, and every one of them is a person at the end of their endurance. It is not a cool verdict about what is wrong. It is what someone feels who has put up with a thing, or with a people, until their stomach turns. Rebekah says it of her own life. The Israelites say it of the food in the wilderness. God says it of the nations he is about to drive out of the land.
The word points in two directions, and the Hebrew marks which one by what follows the verb:
- When the thing loathed is named directly, the sense is disgust: sick of your own life, sick of the bread you are given, sick of being corrected.
- When the wording is "sick at the sight of" a people, the sense tips into dread: Egypt watching the Israelites multiply, Moab watching them camp on its border, Judah watching two kings march toward it.
Those two are one feeling, not two. The dread here is not plain fear. Hebrew has an ordinary word for that (גּוּר), and it stands in the very same sentence in Numbers 22:3, where Moab first fears Israel and then is sickened by the sight of them. This word supplies the revulsion inside the fear: the reaction of people who want the threat out of their sight because they can no longer stand to look at it. Once, in Isaiah 7, it describes making someone else feel that way, when two kings plot to march on Jerusalem.
Proverbs puts the word to its most personal use. "Do not reject the LORD's discipline, and do not be sick of his correction": the verb for rejecting (מָאַס) names the decision, and this one names the churning behind it. That is the line the New Testament picks up in Hebrews 12:5.