raḥam

This verb names mercy felt in the body before it is shown in action. It comes from the same root as the word for a mother's womb, and that picture stays close: the compassion of someone who is bound to another by birth, by love, or by covenant, and cannot simply look away. It is not cool pity from a distance but a stirring of the inner self toward someone who is weak, hurt, or in the wrong.

Far and away its main use is for God. The Old Testament keeps returning to this word to describe how God treats his people: he relents from anger, restores them after exile, and keeps showing mercy even when they have earned none. The famous line in Exodus 33:19, "I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and show compassion to whom I will show compassion," makes the point that this mercy flows from God's own freedom, not from anything that obligates him.

The same word can describe people, and there the Bible often turns it around to its absence: a conquering army that shows no compassion on the young, an enemy who will not pity. Used of people or of God, the heart of the word is the same: a strong inner tenderness that moves the powerful to spare and care for the helpless.

In a single place, Psalm 18:1, the verb takes a plainer form than its usual one and carries the sense "I love you, O LORD, my strength." Standard lexicons treat this as a distinct use: not the parent-toward-child mercy of the common form, but warm, devoted love directed from a worshiper up toward God.

Because it appears only once in this form and this sense, scholars handle it carefully. Some see it as a rare survival of an older, broader meaning of the root; others read the same tender, womb-deep feeling simply pointed the other direction, from a person toward the God who has rescued him.