a heap of ashes, sweepings, and waste dumped at the edge of a town: the filthiest spot in the landscape, and so the lowest place a person can end up.
Every ancient town had one, because everything a household finished with had to go somewhere. Just beyond the houses, or outside the city wall, a pile grew year after year out of:
- ashes raked out of cooking fires
- broken pottery and household sweepings
- animal dung and other waste
This word names that pile. It is a plain, physical noun for an ordinary and unpleasant feature of daily life, and it is never softened.
Because the heap sat at the edge of town and nobody with any standing went near it, it became the natural picture of the very bottom of society. Two songs use it the same way, praising God as the one who raises the poor from the dust (עפר) and lifts the needy from the rubbish heap. The point is not that poor people are dirty. It is that they have been discarded, put out with what the town threw away, and that God goes to that spot to fetch them and seat them with princes. Lamentations sharpens the same image by reversing it: people who once ate delicacies now lie on the heaps in the open streets.
The same word names one of Jerusalem's gates. Nehemiah rides out at night to inspect the broken wall and passes the Refuse Gate, later assigns a man to rebuild it, and later still leads a thanksgiving procession past it. The name is simply descriptive: this was the gate the city's rubbish went out through, on its way to the heap in the valley below. The word inside the name means exactly what it means everywhere else, which is why translators render it as an ordinary word rather than leaving it as a sound.