teshuvah

This noun is built straight from the ordinary Hebrew verb for going back (שׁוּב), and it names the going back itself, not the person or thing that goes. Something has traveled out, and now it is coming round again to where it started.

Five of the six verses in this sense use one fixed phrase, "the return of the year." Ancient armies could not campaign through the winter rains, so the year was felt to come back around to the point where the roads were passable and kings took the field again. That is why the phrase turns up almost entirely inside battle reports: David sending Joab against the Ammonites, the king of Aram regrouping to attack Israel a second time, Nebuchadnezzar reaching back into Jerusalem. English versions usually print "in the spring," which is what the phrase points to but not what it says.

The sixth verse is plainer, and it is the one place the word describes a person. Samuel rides a yearly loop through Bethel, Gilgal, and Mizpah, judging Israel at each stop, and the text says his return was to Ramah, where his house was. The circuit goes out and comes back, and this is the word for the coming back.

Hebrew pictures a reply as something turned back. You send words out, the other person sends words back, and what comes back is a "return." Both verses that use the word this way sit in the book of Job, and in both the speaker is dismissing what he has just heard.

Job uses it of his friends. He has sat through rounds of their speeches, calls the whole of it empty comfort, and says that what is left of their answers is dishonesty. Later Elihu turns the same word back on Job, arguing that Job should be tested to the limit because his answers sound like the answers of guilty men.

So the word is not a neutral term for a response. It names a reply as a move in a dispute, the thing the other side sends back at you, which is exactly why both speakers can wave it away as worthless.