The verb gava is a somewhat literary term for dying, meaning literally 'to breathe out' or 'to expire.' It is used for the deaths of patriarchs, kings, and ordinary Israelites, often carrying a sense of dying in completion or at the end of a full life.
Gava is frequently paired with 'gathered to his people' (Genesis 25:8; 49:33) — the patriarchal formula for death that implies continued community beyond physical life. This language suggests that the patriarchs did not understand death as annihilation but as joining the community of those who had gone before. Jesus's dying — 'he breathed his last' (Mark 15:37; Luke 23:46) — echoes this vocabulary of expiration, the deliberate yielding up of breath that is life itself. The resurrection then becomes the reversal of gava, divine life breathed back in.