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At its root this word is about height. Something is high, or it goes up, or someone takes it and lifts it. From that one physical picture the Bible draws a whole family of related uses, and they all keep the same shape: a thing or a person ends up higher than it was.

The plainest uses are literal. Mountains and trees are tall, floodwaters rise, smoke and glory go up, a hand or a staff is raised. From there the same verb describes status rather than space: God lifts the poor out of the dust and seats them with princes, or he lifts up a chosen servant to honor. The lifting can be welcome, when God raises the lowly, or dangerous, when a person's own heart is lifted up in pride and forgets the God who lifted them.

Two settled uses grow out of this. When people praise God they raise his name high, declaring him exalted above everything, which is the worship cry to extol the LORD. And in the rules for offerings, to lift up a portion is to set it apart for God or the priests, the gift literally taken up off the larger amount.

Whether being raised is good or bad depends entirely on who does the lifting and whether the one lifted stays grateful. The same verb that praises God for lifting the humble also names the arrogant person whose eyes and heart are lifted too high.

This is a separate verb that looks identical to the common word for being high but has nothing to do with it. It describes food spoiling: breeding worms, going putrid, stinking.

It appears in the account of the manna, where the portion that some Israelites hoarded overnight against Moses' instruction bred worms and stank by morning. Because the two verbs are spelled the same, translations and even some reference works occasionally tangle them, but the meaning here is decay, not height.