qaphats

The picture behind this word is small and physical: fingers folding in, lips pressing together. Hebrew already has a general word for closing things (סָגַר), which shuts doors, gates, and whole cities. This one works on a person, and on the parts of a person that give something out.

What gets shut is almost always something another party had a claim on:

• a hand that could have opened to a poor neighbor, in Deuteronomy 15:7
• a mouth left with nothing to say, in Job 5:16, Psalm 107:42, and Isaiah 52:15
• the mercy God might have shown, in the anguished question of Psalm 77:9

That is why the word carries a weight that a neutral word for closing does not. In Deuteronomy 15:7 shutting the hand stands beside hardening the heart, one refusal named twice. In Job and Psalms it is wrongdoing that goes quiet, caught out and with no argument left, and in Isaiah 52:15 kings fall silent in front of a servant they cannot explain.

One verse turns the action around. In Job 24:24 people are the ones being shut: the powerful are closed up and taken away like everyone else, and the next line compares them to heads of grain cut off at harvest.

In the Song of Songs the beloved comes over the hill country, and the line pairs two verbs of the same kind: one is the ordinary word for leaping over something (דָּלַג), and this one answers it on the hills. The effect is speed and lightness, a body clearing ground it should have had to climb.

Scholars explain the connection to the shutting sense in two ways. Some read it as one word: an animal gathers itself together before it springs, so drawing in and bounding out are two halves of one motion. Others treat the bounding word as a separate word that happens to be spelled the same, related to words for jumping in Arabic and in later Hebrew, where this verb is the everyday word for a jump.

Either way, nothing in this verse asks the reader to hear "shut". English "bounding" or "skipping" carries it.