savar

This verb keeps a picture inside it: eyes turned toward something. It is the look of an animal that cannot feed itself watching the hand that will feed it, and the look of a person whose rescue has to come from somewhere else. Hope here is less a mood than a direction. You are facing the thing you are counting on.

Because the look can be aimed at different things, the word stretches across a small range. Sometimes it is a creature turning to a person for supply, sometimes a believer setting his expectation on something God has promised, and sometimes a plain calculation that a certain outcome is on its way. What holds these together is that the thing hoped for is not yet in hand.

Hebrew has several verbs in this neighborhood. One of them, קָוָה, is the usual word for hoping in the LORD, and it strains forward toward what it expects. Another, יָחַל, waits out the delay by resting on a promise. This one holds on to the upward glance: help is somewhere else, and you are watching for it.

One thing the word does not promise is that the hope is well founded. Israel's poets use it for a confidence God answers, but Esther uses it for enemies who fully expected to win the day and were overturned instead.

Twice in the book of Nehemiah the word steps out of the world of hope and into plain observation. Nehemiah goes out by night along the ruined walls of Jerusalem, and this is the verb for what he is doing: looking the damage over, taking stock of it before he tells anyone his plan.

This is probably not a different word so much as the same act of looking, aimed at what is in front of you rather than at what is still to come. Fix your gaze on a thing that is there and you are inspecting it; fix it on a thing that has not arrived and you are hoping for it.

Because these are the only two places the word is used this way, the sense is read out of what Nehemiah is plainly doing, which every major translation renders the same way.