to be poor, to lack property: the condition of having little or nothing, set plainly against being rich
This Hebrew verb describes a straightforward economic condition: not having enough, being the kind of person who stands without property or resources. It serves as both an adjective ("a poor man") and a noun ("the poor"), and it appears overwhelmingly in the wisdom literature of Proverbs, where it is the book's workhorse term for describing people at the lower end of the wealth scale. Its consistent opposite is עָשִׁיר, the word for "the rich", the rich-versus-poor contrast in Proverbs is almost always stated with this word on one side (Prov 22:2; 22:7; 28:6; 29:13).
What makes this word distinctive among Hebrew's several terms for the poor is its register: it is, as scholars from Wittenberg to Fox to Pleins have put it, the morally underdetermined term. It does not automatically code the poor person as a pious sufferer or as the victim of injustice: those connotations belong to other Hebrew words for the poor. This word is descriptive and sociological, naming a state of material lack without pre-judging its cause or loading it with theological weight. That is precisely why Proverbs can deploy the same word both to describe the lazy man whose slack hands produce poverty (10:4) and to defend the dignity of the poor person whose integrity outweighs the rich man's dishonesty (19:1; 28:6).
The word carries this same economic flatness into the narrative texts. When David protests to Saul that he is "a poor and lightly regarded man" (1 Sam 18:23), he is making a claim about social standing and the size of a dowry, the language is transactional. When Nathan constructs his parable of the rich man who took a poor man's one ewe lamb (2 Sam 12:1, 3, 4), the choice of this word over עָנִי, the word for "afflicted", is deliberate: the case is presented as a plain property crime, not a case of oppression, so that David will judge it on its economic merits and unknowingly condemn himself. The LXX translators recognized the register: in Proverbs they consistently render it as penes (the laboring person of limited means) rather than ptochos (the beggar, the destitute), tracking the Hebrew's matter-of-fact tone.
The word has no certain relatives in Akkadian, Ugaritic, Arabic, or Aramaic, which is unusual for a common Hebrew root. BDB, HALOT, and DCH all treat it as a native Hebrew word of uncertain outside origin, and TWOT simply calls it a "primitive root," a scholarly shorthand for acknowledging that its origin is unknown.