sha'al

At its simplest the word covers what people do dozens of times a day: turn to someone and ask. A lost traveler asks a stranger where the shepherds have gone. Joseph asks Pharaoh's officers why their faces are downcast. A child asks what a heap of stones by the river means. A king asks a prisoner, quietly, whether there is any news. Nothing in the word itself says whether the question is casual or urgent, friendly or hostile; the setting supplies all of that.

Two habits of speech stretch the plain question in useful directions:

• Israel's greeting was literally a question about the other person's well-being, so "he asked him about his peace" means simply "he greeted him."
• When the Bible wants someone to learn from what has already been proved, it tells them to ask: ask your father, ask the generation before you, ask the travelers who have seen the world, even ask the animals. The answer is expected to come back as testimony.

The hardest edge of the plain question is interrogation, where the one asking holds all the power. Hostile witnesses press a man about matters he knows nothing of, and out of the whirlwind God tells Job, "I will question you, and you make it known to me." The word has not changed; the balance of power has.

Here the word is after something rather than after information. What people ask for runs the whole range of what people want: a field, a city, a share of the spoil, bread, rain, an escort of soldiers for a dangerous road, wisdom to govern, a child. The word says nothing about whether the request will be granted, which is why the Bible so often pairs it with a verb of giving: she asked, and Solomon gave; ask of me, and I will give you the nations.

Because the one asked is so often God, this is one of the Bible's ordinary words for prayer, and specifically for prayer as petition. Hannah asks for a son, Solomon asks for a discerning heart, the psalmist asks for one thing only, and Israel in the wilderness asks for meat and gets quail. The same word covers requests the text approves and requests it condemns, such as the demand for a king. The word itself passes no verdict.

A few narrower uses branch off the same act:

• Asking permission to be away, which English handles with "asked leave" or "obtained permission".
• Begging, when the asking is desperate and has no claim behind it: children asking for bread with no one to break it for them, a lazy farmer asking at harvest and finding nothing.
• Asking for a death, whether one's own, as Elijah does under the broom tree and Jonah under the withered plant, or an enemy's by way of a curse.
• Wanting something, in verses where a person's own appetite or eyes are said to do the asking.

Israel had a recognized procedure for asking God a question, and this is the verb for it. A leader facing a decision would put the question to God through a priest, who carried a special garment holding two sacred objects, the Urim and the Thummim. The answers in these stories are mostly yes or no, or a choice between two options: shall I go up? will they hand me over? which town first? Numbers 27:21 sets out the arrangement, and Judges through 2 Samuel is thick with it. David asks before nearly every campaign. Saul asks and gets silence.

The same verb names the forbidden versions, and that is the point. Hosea sneers that the people ask a piece of wood. Ezekiel has the king of Babylon asking his household figurines. Deuteronomy 18:11 makes "one who asks a ghost" the standard label for a man who consults the dead, which is exactly what Saul ends up doing at Endor. The Chronicler's verdict on Saul turns on the contrast: he asked a medium, and did not ask the LORD.

The procedure did not outlast the monarchy, and the vocabulary shifted with it. Later books say that a leader sought the LORD (דָּרַשׁ) where earlier ones said he asked him, and Chronicles keeps the older phrase mostly where it is copying Samuel. By the Persian period the sacred objects were gone: Ezra and Nehemiah put disputed priestly claims on hold until a priest should stand with Urim and Thummim, which is a way of saying the question can no longer be asked. What takes its place is prayer, a ruling from the priests about the law, and a word sought through a prophet, all still carried by this same verb.

One law makes this use unmistakable. Exodus 22:14 covers the case of a man who asks an animal from his neighbor and the animal is injured or dies while in his keeping, and the rule that follows is about paying for it. A requirement to make it good only makes sense if the animal was on loan. Two Elisha stories work the same way: a widow is told to ask her neighbors for empty jars, and a workman cries out when the axe head he had asked for sinks into the river, because the tool was not his to lose.

Whether this counts as a separate sense of the word or is just the ordinary "ask for" heard in a setting where the thing goes back is a real question, and the lexicons split on it. Nothing in the word itself carries the idea of return; the object and the surrounding law supply it. What weighs on the other side is that Hebrew developed a matching use of the same verb for the giving side of the transaction, which suggests borrowing was felt as its own thing rather than as a passing shade.

Two verses turn the word around so that the giver, not the asker, is the subject. In Exodus 12:36 the Egyptians let Israel have what they asked, and in 1 Samuel 1:28 Hannah says of the son she had asked for, "I also have made him over to the LORD."

The second of those settles an old argument. If the word here meant "lend", Hannah would be putting Samuel on loan to God, which is plainly not what the chapter is about: she hands him over for good, and the specialized force of the word here is closer to "dedicate". So this use describes an outright transfer, and there is no reason to read a loan into the Egyptian silver and gold either.