qalal

This is the plain, physical core of the word: to weigh little. Everything else it does grows out of that one picture. A light thing is easy to move, easy to lift, and easy to overlook, and Hebrew follows all three of those paths with the same verb.

Three everyday pictures come out of it:

• A light thing travels fast, so the word describes warriors, horses, and birds that are swift, and days that race past.
• A light thing loses its bulk, so floodwaters that are draining off the land are said to grow light.
• A light thing counts for little, so a person can become light in someone else's eyes, meaning their standing has dropped, and a task can be called a light thing, meaning it is small and easily done.

Keep this ordinary sense in view, because the harsher uses of the word all trace back to it. Hebrew set this verb against its opposite, the word for being heavy and so being honored (כָּבֵד): to be heavy is to carry weight with people, and to be light is to carry none.

Here the lightening is put into someone's hands. A person makes a load, a yoke, or a ship lighter: Moses is told to share out the work of judging so that his own load is eased, Israel begs a new king to lift the heavy labor his father imposed, and sailors in a storm throw the cargo overboard so the ship rides higher.

The same action turns cruel when what is made light is a person's honor. To make someone light is to treat them as though they weighed nothing, to knock them down in other people's estimation. So this use runs from the kindness of easing a real burden to the insult of belittling a real person, held together by the single act of taking weight away.

It stops one step short of the word's harshest use. To make someone light in your own eyes is not yet to say so out loud, which is where the next meaning begins.

This is the word's commonest and most forceful use, and it is the same idea carried into speech. To make a person light in your own mind is one thing; to pronounce them light, out loud, is this. The word covers the whole span from an insult flung in a quarrel to a formal calling down of harm, which is why English Bibles render it "revile" in one verse and "curse" in the next.

It is the standing opposite of blessing (בָּרַךְ), and the two are set against each other again and again. The promise to Abram is the classic case, and it is worth noticing that the line uses two different words: the human offense is this lighter one, treating Abram as of no account, while God's answer is the heavier, binding curse (אָרַר).

That difference matters for what a curse with this word actually is. The weight of it falls on dishonoring a person, on stripping away their standing before God and the community, rather than on any power resident in the syllables. The law against cursing a deaf man is the clearest sign: the victim cannot hear the words at all, so the wrong cannot lie in words reaching their target. Not every scholar agrees about how much force such a curse was thought to carry, and that disagreement is recorded here.

A small group of uses is passive, describing not the person who curses but the person cursed, cut off and left under it.

Three verses use a doubled, rocking form of the word for a back and forth motion: hills heaving in an earthquake, a handful of arrows rattled to decide which road an army should take, and iron worked until it takes an edge.

These may not belong with the rest of the word at all. Shaking and sharpening have nothing obvious to do with weighing little, and many scholars treat them as a separate look-alike verb that happens to be spelled the same way. The older lexicons kept them together on the reasoning that a light thing is easily shaken, and one nineteenth-century proposal even made shaking the original sense of the whole word. That disagreement is recorded here, and it is the reason these uses are kept apart from the plain sense of low weight rather than folded into it.