Garash גָּרַשׁ
The Bible’s exile verb
“So he drove out the man.” The verb is garash — and it is worth following, because Scripture keeps reaching for this exact word at its expulsions. Adam’s is the first of a series.
His trunk on the street, the door bolted behind him, lamplight in windows that are no longer his. Being put out of a house that was home — the Bible keeps reaching for this verb for it.
The series
One chapter on, Cain is driven out in his father’s verb — and he names the real loss himself: from thy face shall I be hid. Exile, in this book, is losing the Presence.
Sarah’s “cast out” is garash — and Paul quotes that very sentence as Scripture’s living word about who inherits. (His Greek uses its own word; the sentence he reaches for is the garash-sentence.) And when Hosea announces Israel’s own expulsion, he says it in this verb too: “I will drive them out of mine house” (Hosea 9:15).
Garash burns low in the dusk sky, opposite the promise that follows the exiles out.
Open this scene’s sky →Garash is used of many expulsions — nations driven from Canaan, a divorced wife (the same verb, hard as that is), priests put from office. It is not a magic covenant word. Our claim is narrower: at the Bible’s covenant expulsions — Adam, Cain, the bondwoman — this is the verb the text reaches for, and Adam’s is the pattern-setter. The exile is real; the question is what kind of thing was lost. Cain told you: a face.