to lie down: to settle the body low against the ground, the way an animal drops to rest or a predator couches over its lair
The word pictures one bodily posture: a living thing pressed flat against the ground. It belongs first to animals. Flocks doze by a well, a donkey folds under its load, a lion stretches over its kill, a mother bird settles on her eggs. From that plain picture the word reaches into images of peace and of danger alike.
The same posture can mean opposite things. When a flock lies down and nothing frightens it, the word paints security and covenant peace, the bodily shape of trust, and the prophets use it for a restored people and even for the age when leopard and young goat rest side by side. When a lion or a river beast takes the same low position, it signals a predator secure in its power. Hebrew writers play on this double edge on purpose.
A causative form turns the picture into something done to another: a shepherd bedding a flock down at midday, and above all God making his people lie down in safety, as in the shepherd psalm.
One famous line stands apart. In the warning to Cain, sin is said to be crouching at the door, using this same word, and readers have argued for centuries over whether that names a lurking demon, pictures sin as a coiled beast, or points to an animal brought for sacrifice.
Nuances
What the crouching thing at the door is in Genesis 4:7, and how to resolve the mismatch between the feminine noun for sin and the masculine grammar that follows.
- contestedThe word is a personified demon, a Hebrew echo of the Akkadian rabisu, a croucher that lurks at thresholds; taking it as a masculine noun for that figure resolves the gender mismatch.; E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible 1; Doubleday, 1964), 30-33; N. M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary; JPS, 1989), 32-33
- contestedThe word is a literary personification of sin as a crouching beast lying in wait, with no specific demon required; the vivid concrete image accounts for the masculine forms.; G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (WBC 1; Word, 1987), 104-106; U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part I (Magnes, 1961), 208-212
- minorityThe word refers to a male animal crouching at the door as a sin offering, with the masculine grammar pointing to that animal; the verb elsewhere means peaceful couching, not crouching to pounce, so a predatory reading is lexically unwarranted.; L. M. Morales, Crouching Demon, Hidden Lamb? Resurrecting an Exegetical Fossil in Gen 4.7, The Bible Translator 63/4 (2012): 185-191; R. P. Gordon, Couch or Crouch? Genesis 4:7 and the Temptation of Cain, in On Stone and Scroll (BZAW 420; De Gruyter, 2011), 195-209