ta'ar

• This word carries a line onward and bends it at the next named place, one landmark at a time, with no circling at all: from the hilltop to the spring and out to Baalah, then along to Shikkeron, or simply away from the north side.Jos 15:9Jos 15:11Jos 18:17
• Outside the land lists it belongs to a craftsman drawing an outline before he cuts: the woodworker stretches his measuring cord, marks the figure out with a scratching tool, and only then shapes it. That is the same act of setting a line down on purpose, applied to wood rather than to a map.Isa 44:13

• Both are working verbs of the tribal boundary surveys, each taking the border as its subject and handing it on to the next place, and Joshua 18:14 uses the two together in one sentence for a single stretch of the Benjamin line.Jos 18:14
• Because each of them changes a border's direction at a landmark, English versions often render both simply "turned", so consecutive verses of the Judah survey read alike whether the line is being traced on to Baalah or swung around from there toward Mount Seir.Jos 15:9Jos 15:10

• Only this word closes a full circle around something, so that the thing is ringed: the army walking a lap around Jericho, the river running all the way around the land of Havilah, the sheaves in the dream gathering into a ring around one sheaf. A traced border line never does this.Jos 6:3Gen 2:11Gen 37:7
• It is also the plain word for a person wheeling about, whether to leave, to go somewhere else, or to fall on someone: Joseph turns away from his brothers to weep, Samuel turns to go, and Saul orders his runners to turn on the priests.Gen 42:241Sa 15:271Sa 22:17
• Its range reaches well past land surveys to anything turned about or turned over: a family holding is not to pass around from one tribe to another, and a cart wheel is driven back and forth over the cummin seed.Num 36:7Isa 28:27

• Traces the run of a boundary across open country, following where the line goes from one landmark to the next as it turns at a hilltop, bends toward a town, or swings around to the west.Jos 15:9Jos 15:11Jos 18:14Jos 18:17Jos 19:13
• Lays down the guiding outline that a carver's tools will afterward follow, and does no cutting itself: the woodworker stretches his measuring line, marks the shape with a stylus and a compass, and only then works the wood down to the figure of a man.Isa 44:13

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• Cuts the mark into something hard, so that the surface itself is changed: a burial chamber hollowed out of rock, a city scratched into a clay brick, figures carved into a wall, a name cut into open palms.Isa 22:16Ezk 4:1Ezk 23:14Isa 49:16
• Because a cut mark lasts, the word also covers putting words permanently on record, written down so they survive into a later day.Job 19:23Isa 30:8
• Fixes a limit that cannot then be crossed, because the limit is cut in rather than merely followed: God sets the circle over the deep and the footings of the earth, and the sea is held to that line.Pro 8:27Pro 8:29
• Moves from cutting a mark to laying down a binding ruling, whether a just one or a corrupt one, and a ruling that a drunk king forgets to his people's cost.Pro 8:15Isa 10:1Pro 31:5
• Names the person who issues such rulings, the commander with the staff in his hand, often rendered "lawgiver" or "ruler" in English Bibles.Gen 49:10Jdg 5:9Num 21:18Isa 33:22