ta'av

This is the verb behind the well-known noun for an abomination (toevah). To abhor something is to treat it as detestable and recoil from it. The loathing may be God's, a whole community's, or a single person's, and its object may be an idol, an enemy, a truth no one wants to hear, or even food a sick person can no longer stand.

The word covers a wide range of revulsion. God abhors the violent and the deceitful (Psalm 5:6), and in anger he can turn against his own people (Psalm 106:40). People abhor an idol devoted to destruction (Deuteronomy 7:26), a friend who has become a stranger (Job 19:19), or someone who tells them a truth they would rather silence (Amos 5:10). It can even be physical, as when a dying person's appetite fails and the soul loathes all food (Psalm 107:18).

The same word also runs the opposite direction. A person or thing can be the one abhorred, the object others find loathsome and shun. That is how it describes corrupt humanity (Job 15:16), a discarded corpse (Isaiah 14:19), and a command that struck a commander as detestable (1 Chronicles 21:6).

In a smaller group of passages the word shifts from feeling revulsion to producing it. Here the point is not that someone loathes evil but that someone does what is loathsome, acting so detestably that the deeds themselves become an abomination.

This is the charge leveled at the fool who says there is no God and then does abominable deeds (Psalm 14:1; Psalm 53:1), at King Ahab who acted utterly abominably by chasing after idols (1 Kings 21:26), and at Jerusalem, pictured as a woman who made her own beauty detestable (Ezekiel 16:25) and outdid her neighbors in doing detestable things (Ezekiel 16:52).

The two meanings are held together by a single idea, what counts as detestable. The first meaning recoils from it; this second meaning commits it.