raḥaq

This is the plain, physical idea behind the word: a person or thing is a long way off, or moves away and keeps its distance. It covers literal space (a person sitting or standing far off, a place too far to reach) and the relational distance that follows when people pull back from someone.

The same picture carries the word's most painful use. When help, justice, or God himself feels far away, the writers of the Psalms reach for this verb. The cry "do not be far from me" is not asking God to move closer in space; it asks him not to stand back when the person praying most needs him to act. The sense of abandonment is built on the simple notion of distance.

The word does not by itself say whether the distance is good or bad. Drawing back can be wise (steering clear of trouble) or tragic (drifting away from God). The context, not the word, supplies the verdict.

Hebrew can turn this verb around so that someone actively pushes a thing away rather than simply being far off. Here the subject sends, drives, or carries something to a distance: God scatters a people far among the nations, an army is lured far from its city, sins are carried as far away as the sunrise is from the sunset.

The most common form of this is a command to put something away from yourself. "Keep your way far from her," "put crooked speech away from you," "remove falsehood far from me": the verb makes moral distance an act of the will, something a person deliberately does. The thing to be removed is usually a sin, a danger, or a temptation, and the instruction is to get it as far from oneself as possible.

Because the action and the simple state share one root, the two run together in a single image. To put a thing far off (this meaning) and for a thing to end up far off (the first meaning) are two sides of the same distance.