TO GO SLACK, to let drop — and in the causative, to LET GO of something you were holding. The picture is a hand loosening, not a promise failing, which matters because the causative turns up in one of the most quoted sentences in the Bible. Lo yarpekha ve-lo ya’azvekka, ‘he will not let go of you and he will not forsake you’, stands in three verses of the Hebrew Bible: Deuteronomy 31:6 and 31:8 (both now on these pages), and 1 Chronicles 28:20, where David hands Solomon the charge and this promise in one breath. ⚠ Six of the seven English versions on this project’s shelf read it as reliability rather than grip — KJV, ASV and Geneva 1599 all print ‘he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee’, and NIV ‘he will never leave you nor forsake you’ — while only the NWT 1984 reaches for something odder, ‘He will neither desert you nor leave you entirely’. ⭐ The Greek of Hebrews 13:5 (not yet on these pages) keeps the hand: ou mē se anō, built on aniēmi, to slacken or release. Elsewhere the same root is what hands do when they hang down in fear, and what Israel is told to stop doing in the famous imperative harpu u-de’u, ‘let go, and know that I am God’ (Psalm 46:11 in the Hebrew numbering, not yet on these pages) — the verb for a relaxed grip aimed, there, at the reader’s own. → first discussed at Deut 31:6