taqa

This is the literal core of the word: a single hard motion that drives one thing into another. A hand swings a hammer and the tent peg goes into the ground; a soldier rams a blade home; a strong wind hurls a swarm into the sea. The same physical picture covers very different objects because what the word names is the motion, not the thing moved.

The senses below sort by what is driven and where. Notice that the word can have a person doing the driving (Ehud, Jael, Joab) or a force of nature (the wind in Egypt), and that the target can be earth, a wall, or living flesh. In every case there is impact and lodging: the object goes in and stays put.

The English translator has to choose a verb to match the object, which is why one Hebrew word becomes drive, thrust, pierce, pitch, or fasten in the same English Bible.

By far the most common use of the word, and the reason most readers meet it. The horn (a ram's horn) or the metal trumpet is sounded with the same idea of a sharp, driven blow, now of breath instead of a hammer. A blast is forced out; it cuts through and carries.

The blast is a signal, and the setting tells you what it means: marching orders and festival worship in the wilderness, the wall of Jericho falling, Gideon's three hundred startling a camp at night, a king being crowned, a watchman warning a city, the day God himself sounds the great horn to gather the scattered. The act is always the same; the message is read from the moment.

Many of these verses name the instrument outright (a ram's horn or a trumpet), so the meaning is rarely in doubt. Where no instrument is named but the context is an alarm or an assembly, the same blast is in view.

The same striking blow used for driving a peg, now applied to the clap of the hand. It splits into two settings, told apart by who claps and why.

In Proverbs and Job it is a fixed legal gesture: striking your palm into another's sealed a guarantee, like a handshake closing a deal today, except it bound you to pay if the other person defaulted. Every time it carries this sense it is paired with the word for going surety, and the advice is always the same, do not put your hand to a stranger's debt. Job uses the same picture when he asks God to be the one who strikes hands for him, since no human will.

In a few other places the hands are clapped together in acclamation, the peoples applauding God as king, or onlookers clapping over the downfall of a cruel city. The motion is the same striking clap; here it expresses approval or triumph rather than a binding promise.

Setting up camp. A tent stands because its pegs are hammered into the ground, so the same word that drives a peg comes to mean putting up the tent itself.

Jacob pitches his tent in the hill country and Laban pitches his to face it; in Jeremiah enemy shepherds pitch their tents around a doomed city. The picture is the literal driving of stakes, named for the whole act of making camp.