tamam

At its heart this verb describes something arriving at its full extent and so being done with. The same idea covers a stretch of time running out, a supply being spent down to nothing, a task being carried all the way through, and a group of people being wiped out. In each case the thing in view has been brought to its limit and there is no more of it.

Because the focus is on reaching an end, the tone of the verb depends entirely on what is ending. When days of mourning end or a building is finished, the sense is simply completion. When water, money, or strength gives out, the sense is depletion. When an army or a generation is finished off, the same verb turns grim and means perish or be destroyed.

The causative forms, where someone makes the ending happen, carry the same range: to finish a job, to use something up, or to make a full end of a people or of sin. Translators reach for many different English words here, but the underlying picture is constant: the matter has run its course to the last.

Alongside the idea of something running out, this verb carries a moral sense built on the same root picture of being entire and undivided. Here a person is complete in the sense of having integrity: upright, with nothing crooked held back. This is the wholeness of a life that is all of a piece, not the depletion of a supply.

The sense shows up most clearly where a worshiper hopes to stand clear of great wrongdoing, or where Scripture says that God deals with the blameless person in a matching way. It is the verbal cousin of the familiar adjective for a person of integrity, and it should not be confused with the more common sense of things being used up or finished off.