a whip: the flexible lash swung to drive an animal or beat a person, and a stroke of trouble pictured as falling the same way
This is the ordinary word for a whip, the working tool of a driver or a taskmaster. It is not a stick. Where the rigid rod (שֵׁבֶט) or the staff (מַטֶּה) is swung as one solid piece, this word names the lash that snaps, and the sound is what a person notices first: Nahum can announce an invading army with almost nothing but the crack of a whip and the rumble of wheels.
Whips fall on animals and on people, and the one word covers both. Proverbs sets it beside a bridle for the donkey and a rod for the back of a fool. Rehoboam's boast turns it on his own work crews: his father disciplined them with whips, he says, and he will use scorpions.
Because a whip lands suddenly and from above, the word also names trouble that arrives that way. The figure falls on three kinds of harm:
- a sudden disaster that kills the innocent along with the guilty, in Job 9:23
- an army God raises up to punish a proud nation, in Isaiah 10:26
- the cutting speech of other people, called the lash of the tongue in Job 5:21
Even at its most figurative the picture stays concrete: something held in a hand, swung, and landing on somebody's back. A rare relative of this word (שֹׁטֵט) works the same way once, naming hostile nations left in the land as a whip at Israel's side.