ravah

This is the verb at rest, reporting that something has become more: a family, a herd, a harvest, a run of years. It is the second half of the Bible's oldest blessing, "be fruitful and multiply," where the first verb (פָּרָה) names the bearing of offspring and this one names the swelling numbers that follow. Genesis says it over fish and birds, then over people, then again over Noah's household, and Exodus opens by reporting it as accomplished fact: the Israelites in Egypt grew so numerous that Pharaoh took fright.

The word is not confined to counting heads. What grows can be an amount of grain or silver, the reach of a road that has become too long, the greatness of God measured against a man, or the days of a life. Hebrew is content to use one verb for all of it, and the words around it tell you what is swelling. That range is why English translations reach for so many different words here: multiply, increase, be many, be great, be long.

The growth itself is morally neutral. Blessing increases, and so do enemies, sins, and sorrows. When a prophet or a psalmist uses this verb of wickedness piling up, that is no twist on its meaning: the warmth readers often hear in it comes from the company the word usually keeps, not from the word.

Here the same verb is turned outward: someone makes the numbers go up. God multiplies a people, a king multiplies horses, a merchant piles up silver, a fool multiplies words. Whoever is doing it is in charge of the increase, and what grows is what the verb acts on.

This is the form of the promise repeated to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that God will multiply their descendants past counting. It is also the form of the Bible's sharpest warnings, because increase is exactly the thing a person can want too much of:

• Israel's king is forbidden to multiply horses, wives, or silver and gold (Deuteronomy 17:16 and 17:17), a law the story of Solomon then measures him against point by point.
• Hosea says that the more Israel's produce increased, the more altars it multiplied, so the blessing itself paid for the idolatry.
• Amos invites eager pilgrims to "multiply transgression" at the sanctuary, a parody of devotion (Amos 4:4).

One use drifted away from counting altogether. Because "make much" slides so easily into "do much," the bare form hardened into an everyday intensifier meaning "greatly, a lot, in abundance," and a Hebrew sentence can set it beside another verb to mean little more than "very." That plain use is listed as its own shade below, along with the few places where the word is about bringing young up rather than making them numerous.

A separate word that happens to be spelled like the common verb for multiplying but has nothing to do with quantity. It belongs to the world of the bow, and it surfaces clearly in one place: Ishmael grows up in the wilderness and becomes a shooter, an archer.

Because the letters match the far more frequent verb, this use is easy to overlook, and older English versions sometimes printed "archer" in places where the increase verb was meant. The standard lexicons treat the shooting sense as a separate root that shares only its spelling with the verb for becoming many.