Garash גָּרַשׁ
The Bible’s exile verb
“So he drove out the man.” The verb is garash, and Scripture keeps using 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 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 has its own word for it; the sentence he chose is the garash-sentence.) 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).
David says the same thing about himself, on the run from Saul. To be driven from the land is to be driven from the LORD’s own inheritance. It is Cain’s complaint, in a king’s mouth.
Garash burns low in the dusk sky, opposite the promise that follows the exiles out.
Open this scene’s sky →"Drove out" means Adam and Eve were physically expelled from the garden and cut off from the tree of life, so that they would die.
"Drove out" (garash) is Scripture's verb for covenant expulsions, so Adam's exile is chiefly the loss of God's face, the pattern Cain and Israel repeat.
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. The claim here is narrower. At the Bible’s covenant expulsions (Adam, Cain, the bondwoman, David) this is the verb the text uses, and Adam’s is the pattern-setter. It is not the prophets’ main word for the Babylonian and Assyrian exiles. That job mostly belongs to galah (H1540, “to go into exile”), a different verb this page doesn’t cover. The exile is real; the question is what kind of thing was lost. Cain named it: a face.