TO ANNIHILATE, to wipe out — a verb that in the Hebrew Bible exists almost only in its causative forms, which is to say it is a thing somebody DOES to somebody, never something that merely happens. It is the third member of a family this project has now entered one chapter at a time: cherem (Deuteronomy 7) devotes a thing to destruction as something set apart; abad (Deuteronomy 8) is the plain verb of a thing ceasing to be; shamad is extermination as a decision, and it takes a direct object. ⭐ Deuteronomy 9 (already on these pages) runs it SIX times in twenty-nine verses — 9:3, 8, 14, 19, 20, 25 — against twenty-nine occurrences in the whole book, so about a fifth of Deuteronomy’s uses of the word stand in this one chapter. ⚠ Only chapter 28 carries more (seven), and a search on the plene spelling alone will not show that: ten of the book’s occurrences are written defectively and are invisible to it. What makes the concentration worth naming is who the object is: at v3 it is the Canaanite nations, and at vv8, 14, 19 and 25 it is Israel, with v20 aiming it at Aaron by name. The same verb, in one chapter, points in both directions. → first discussed at Deut 9:3