Abarim Publications' online Biblical Hebrew Dictionary
נבע
The verb נבע (naba') means to flow, pour or gush forth, and that predominantly of speech (Psalm 19:3, 59:7, 94:4, 145:7, Proverbs 1:23), praise (Psalm 119:171), and rarely something like a bad smell (Ecclesiastes 10:1), general evil (Proverbs 15:28) or folly (Proverbs 15:2).
In Psalm 78:2 our verb occurs in the famous, "I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings of old", which reflects the fractal nature of reality. A fractal is any form or shape in which structures are repeated at various levels of complexity. Famous examples are the Mandelbrot Set or the Koch Snowflake (see these things explained in our Introduction to Chaos Theory). In the Bible a famous example is the tabernacle, which Moses built according to patterns he was shown on the mountain (Exodus 25:40, Acts 7:44, Hebrews 8:5). A slightly more abstract one is the Story of the Father with the Three Sons (one bad one, one middle one and one good one, in whom the family is preserved), which manifests in Adam and his three sons, Noah and his three sons and finally Terah and his three sons. Many more such fractals exist in the Bible, and all stories of the Bible are only explained by their one or two counterparts (Matthew 18:20), and never by anybody's dogmas or exegeses. But since only these local manifestations can be observed and interacted with, the underlying patterns exist really only in the eye of the beholder. But when they do, they are words. Or rather, our human "words" are really the name of such general patterns.
Everybody knows that the material universe can be compressed into a singularity, in which even the forces of nature are folded together and nothing gets "violated": it's simply part of the normal functioning of the universe, that can fold in and out like an umbrella. And even when the universe expands, the singularity is never compromised, and every spoke points to the hub, and all things and forces still fit together into a harmonic whole. This is where the preservation laws (of energy, momentum, baryon number and so on) come from. Only when the universe has expanded so far that individual particles lose their link to all other particles, then the singularity has ended and nature has truly fractured. This is called Heat Death (because "heat" is about particles bouncing off each other, so when that stops, heat has died).
The grand insight that the ancients had (Abraham, to be precise) is that life started out not in a singularity (meaning: Adam was not a man but the man: humanity, comprising many men) but rather in a heat death. When the first living cells blinked into existence, none of them had ever seen another one. They ate inorganic matter and had no idea what they were and that they had neighbors. But then they discovered them. And they began to interact and exchange information, so that they began to share a reality. In some abstract way, one could say that they began to collectively contract, away from the condition of heat death and ultimately toward a state of singularity very far into their future.
The little neighbors began to talk, and form alliances, then colonies. Then they began to be multi-cellular, and developed brains. These brained creatures began to once again discover each other, and exchange information. Then they developed language, and law and created cities, forever clinging to the ancient endeavor to meet at some future singularity: the vision of which drove them ever forward and ever closer together. That singularity, the Bible calls the Oneness of God (Deuteronomy 6:4, 2 Peter 1:4, John 17:21-23, Ephesians 4:3-6), a.k.a. the Logos (John 1:1, Colossians 1:16-17). And just like all the particles and forces that will ever exist in the universe were already present in the starting conditions of the universe, so all meaning and all mental elements and all minds exist in harmonic oneness (Ephesians 1:10) in the singularity at the conclusion of all evolution (the verb to evolve means to roll out; it does not speak of natural selection and survival of the fittest, or any such minor mechanisms).
But the great insight that the ancients had is that there are two realities: (1) that of matter, which evolves from singularity toward heat death, and (2) that of information, which evolves from heat death toward singularity. And these two do that in predictable regularities, which relate like inverted fractals (not unlike particle and anti-particle). This is how we can know the rough outlines of things that will certainly happen in our mental future because they have already happened in our material past: "I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth, so that if anyone can number the dust of the earth, then your descendants can also be numbered" (Genesis 13:16, see Galatians 3:7, and compare Genesis 2:7 with Acts 2:2).
And it's also why we can be entirely sure about the reality of God — even though all we ever get to see of God is his unity, his Oneness. As we explain at greater length in our article on θεος (theos), meaning "god", God does not exist, because if he did, then he would depend on existence, and existence would be greater than he. Instead, God is greater than existence, and it depends on him. Existence depends on Oneness, and without the latter, there is no former, which means that Oneness is a requirement of Existence, so that there can be Oneness without Existence but no Existence without Oneness. This in turn means that when Existence itself comes to an end, Oneness, and all it entails, will continue.
It's rather amazing that in our day and age there are still people who genuinely manage to be atheists. That takes a very special sort of ignorance. Fortunately for the rest of us, the ancients understood the link between material things and mental things, or energy and information: see our article on the verb נהר (nahar), which both means to flow (what a river does) and to shine (what a lamp does). The ancients were able to write all these things down and pass them onto us moderns because they first developed the most unified language the world has ever seen, which is Hebrew. Mathematics is the language of the material universe, but cannot properly describe the mental universe. The language of the mental universe is Hebrew, which is the very vehicle in which God's Oneness came to mankind and revealed himself (Genesis 15:1). This is why people who are actually serious about wanting to meet God and his Christ, learn Biblical Hebrew. It's a long journey, because learning Hebrew requires the brain to rewire itself and the mind to reboot (Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:23, John 3:3). It's hard and painful and frustrating (Luke 18:1-8) and not rarely results in whopping psychoses, which is why we never do such things by ourselves and always together with others (Hebrews 10:25).
But people who already know the Bible already know the narrative layer that emerges naturally from the language (like mist from the ground: Genesis 2:6). People who already speak a related language like Arabic or in lesser degree any Slavic language, also have a far less great leap to make. People who speak only one language, particularly when that language is English, and don't know the stories of the Bible and are not familiar with the basic narrative principles of the Bible, are in an unimaginable heap of trouble (see our article on Mesopotamia for more on that).
From our verb נבע (naba') derives the noun מבוע (mabu'a), which literally describes a place of gushing: a well or spring (Ecclesiastes 12:6, Isaiah 35:7 and 49:10 only).