healing pictured as a wound closing over: the mending that comes up on what was torn open, whether that is a body or a broken wall.
The picture behind this word is a wound knitting shut. Hebrew does not say that this healing arrives or is given; it says the healing "comes up" on the injured place, the way fresh skin grows over a cut. So the word names the visible mending of specific damage rather than a general condition of feeling well.
That image holds whether the patient is a person or a pile of stones:
- Jeremiah asks why the healing of his people has not come up, when there is balm in Gilead and a physician there (Jeremiah 8:22).
- God promises to bring healing up for a wounded Zion whom no one else will treat (Jeremiah 30:17).
- The repairs came up on the temple work as the craftsmen finished it (2 Chronicles 24:13).
- Sanballat is furious when he hears that healing has come up on the walls of Jerusalem and the gaps in them are being closed (Nehemiah 4:7).
Because the mending is something that grows, Isaiah can speak of it like a plant: your healing will spring up quickly, in the same breath as light breaking out at dawn (Isaiah 58:8). And because it names the closing of one particular injury, it sits easily beside the broader word for a cure (מַרְפֵּא), which Jeremiah puts next to it in Jeremiah 33:6, and apart from the word for the remedy that gets applied (רְפֻאָה).
The two settings, a wounded body and a ruined wall, are not two ideas in Hebrew. They are one: something torn open is being closed again, and you can see it happening.