sane

This is hatred as most readers picture it: a settled hostility that turns one person against another and then shows up in what they do. Joseph's brothers hate him until they cannot speak civilly to him. Amnon's craving for Tamar flips into loathing the moment he has forced her. Ahab hates the prophet Micaiah for never bringing him good news. Because the hostility is a stance and not just a mood, the word slides easily from describing a feeling to naming a person: "one who hates you" is one of the ordinary Hebrew ways of saying "your enemy", and that is how a large share of the occurrences work. Alongside אֹיֵב, the standard noun for an enemy, this verb supplies the Bible's other main way of naming the people ranged against you.

The senses below separate the plain emotion from that hardened role, and set apart three narrower uses:

• the courtroom use, where a killer's earlier grudge against his victim is what makes the death murder rather than an accident
• the covenant use, where "those who hate God" are people who have broken faith with him rather than simply people with angry feelings
• the weary loathing of Ecclesiastes, where the writer turns against life itself and against his own work

The law works with this hostility rather than pretending it away. It forbids nursing hatred against a fellow Israelite in the heart, and the concern is practical as well as moral: hatred kept quiet festers into slander and bloodshed, so the remedy the same verse prescribes is to speak to the person openly instead of saying nothing.

Here the word is not a flare of temper but a verdict. To hate in this sense is to find something wrong and want nothing to do with it, and what stands on the receiving end is almost always a practice or a deed rather than a person. God hates child sacrifice, sacred pillars, robbery, and false swearing. The famous list in Proverbs of six things the LORD hates is a list of behaviors.

The sharpest cases are the prophetic ones. When God says he hates Israel's festivals and cannot bear her new moons, the target is not worship itself; it is worship used as cover for injustice, which is why the same speech in Amos goes straight on to demand that justice roll down like water. Read as divine distaste for ritual, those lines say close to the opposite of what they mean.

People are called to the same refusal, and the wisdom writers work both sides of it. The wise hate dishonest gain, falsehood, and every crooked path; the fool hates knowledge, discipline, and correction, and Micah's rulers hate good and love evil. Either way the word marks where someone's loyalty lies, which is why it pairs so naturally with its opposite, the verb for loving (אָהֵב): hate evil, love good.

Hebrew sometimes uses this strong word in a plainly comparative way: to "hate" a person can mean to love them less than someone else, to leave them unfavored. Genesis says so outright. Jacob "loved Rachel more than Leah", and the very next line reports that the LORD saw Leah was "hated". Nothing more is claimed than that she came second.

Deuteronomy turns the comparison into a legal standing. A man with two wives, one loved and one unloved, may not favor the loved wife's son when he divides the inheritance. Legal documents from neighboring cultures let a father choose whichever son he liked as heir; this law takes that freedom away and protects the son of the wife nobody preferred.

One proverb pushes further still. A father who spares the rod is said to hate his son, and no feeling at all is described: failing to give the boy what he is owed simply counts as hating him. This is the meaning most easily misread, because English "hated" sounds like a charge of malice when the Hebrew is often only keeping score of who is preferred.

In legal language the word stops describing a feeling and starts performing an act. Deuteronomy's marriage rules run "he takes a wife, goes in to her, and hates her", and what follows is a procedure rather than a mood: he smears her name, or writes her a certificate of dismissal and sends her away. The word for hating and the word for sending away travel together.

Jewish legal papers from a community at Elephantine in Egypt, from the fifth century before Christ, show why. There the same root is the actual wording of a divorce: "I hate you, I will not be your wife", declared in front of witnesses, after which a payment the documents call "silver of hatred" settles the property and the marriage is over. Saying it was doing it, much as "I now pronounce you" is not a description but an act.

The same move works at the level of a nation. God "hates" a people he had bound himself to, which in Hosea and Jeremiah means formally breaking off with a partner who will not be held. And in Malachi, "Esau I hated" set against "Jacob I loved" is the language of choosing one and passing over the other, with Edom's ruin offered as the evidence, not a report of how God felt. This is also why one famous English sentence, "I hate divorce", has largely disappeared from recent translations: the Hebrew verb form says "he hated", and the verse is most likely about the man who repudiates his wife and sends her off.