thank you, Zondervan

The folks on Zondervan's blog, Koinōnia, announced yesterday a Hebrew + Greek Bible Giveaway, in which Zondervan solicited readers' favorite Greek or Hebrew words. They selected five winners today. My entry, included below, was one of the five. Thank you, Zondervan, for my copy of A Reader's Hebrew and Greek Bible.

My entry:

ἀποτυμπανίζω, as in Dan. 7.11 [LXX (Old Greek)]:

I was then watching the noise of the great words, which the horn kept speaking, and the beast was beaten to death [ἀπετυμπανίσθη], and its body perished and was given over to burning with fire. (NETS)

According to the abridged LSJ, ἀποτυμπανίζω means "to cudgel to death." If language develops words to describe life, why did the ancients need a single word for "to cudgel to death"?

See my earlier post for my initial discovery of this word.