An AXE — the iron head and the wooden handle it comes off. Deuteronomy 19:5 uses it for the Bible’s one worked example of an accidental killing: a man swings to fell a tree, the iron slips from the wood and finds his neighbour. ⭐ Searched consonantally the noun stands in four verses of the Hebrew Bible, and they make an unusually tidy set. Two are consecutive chapters of this book — this one, and Deuteronomy 20:19, where an army besieging a city may not swing one at a fruit tree. One is 1 Kings 6:7, where the temple is built of finished stone so that hammer and axe, any iron tool, was not heard in the house while it was being built. And one is Isaiah 10:15, which asks whether the axe glorifies itself against the man who chops with it — the same object, turned into an argument about Assyria. ⚠ The chapter never calls it an axe-head: it says the iron, ha-barzel, and the piece it leaves is the etz, the wood, which is also the tree he was felling and the timber they came for. Three senses of one word in one verse. → first discussed at Deut 19:5