radaph

This is the word's home base: a fast, physical chase after a person or group running away. It is the verb for an army breaking the enemy's line and running them down, the verb for a man tearing off after thieves who have raided his camp, the verb for a victor pressing the advantage so the rout becomes a slaughter.

The scenes are concrete and repeatable. Israel pursues the Canaanites down the pass; Pharaoh's chariots pursue Israel to the sea; David asks whether to chase the raiding band. The point of the chase is almost always to catch and finish, so the word often pairs with striking down, overtaking, or destroying what it runs after.

It does not by itself say who is right. The same verb covers a just pursuit of attackers and a wicked king's pursuit of an innocent man. What it fixes is the picture: one side runs, the other runs after.

Here the chase turns hostile and unjust. The same running-down verb is now aimed at someone who should be left alone: the innocent, the poor, the faithful person whose only offense is to belong to God. This is the cry that fills the laments of the Psalms, where the speaker is not a soldier but a victim, hunted by enemies who will not relent.

The target is a person rather than a fleeing army, and the wrong is built into the picture. To be on the receiving end of this word is to be worn down, cornered, given no rest. The prophets use it of the powerful grinding the weak, and Lamentations uses it of God himself hunting down a people under judgment.

This sense sits very close to the literal chase, and the line is not always sharp; what marks it off is that the running-down is treated as an injustice or an affliction, not a battlefield maneuver.

The chase can also be lifted off the battlefield entirely and turned into a picture of what a person sets their heart on. To go after righteousness, peace, or justice is to pursue them the way a hunter pursues prey: deliberately, persistently, with everything bent toward catching them.

The wisdom writers and prophets press this image both ways. Pursuing the right things, justice, peace, the knowledge of God, is held up as the shape of a good life. Pursuing the wrong things, empty fantasies, the wind, drink, gifts and bribes, is folly that ends in nothing or in ruin.

The verb itself stays neutral about the prize; the worth of the pursuit is set by what is being chased. That is what makes the same word fit both the command to chase peace and the warning against chasing emptiness.