baqaq

The picture behind this verb is a container tipped up and drained. Hebrew calls a clay flask a "baqbuq", a name that imitates the gurgle of liquid running out, and the verb belongs with that sound. So when Isaiah says the LORD is emptying the earth, the image is not a wall smashed or a city burned but a vessel poured out until nothing is left inside it.

The prophets aim the word in two directions:

• Outward at a whole country, which is emptied of its people and its goods, as when plunderers strip Israel bare or invaders drain the fields of Babylon.
• Inward at what a people carries within itself, so that Egypt's nerve runs out of it and Judah's carefully laid plans are poured away to nothing.

The sound of the word is part of its force. In Isaiah 24:1 it stands beside a near twin for ruining a land (בָּלַק), and two verses later beside the ordinary word for plundering (בָּזַז), so the threat lands as a pair of matched drumbeats rather than a flat statement. Nahum sets the verb next to its own participle, so the line reads "emptiers have emptied them". And in Jeremiah 19 the prophet is told to buy a clay flask before God announces that he will pour out the plans of Judah, which makes the sentence of judgment sound like the object in the prophet's hand.

Everything in this meaning rests on one line in Hosea, where Israel is called a certain kind of vine and the point that follows is that the more fruit it bore, the more altars it built. The ancient Greek and Latin translators took the word to mean a vine thick with branches, and most modern English Bibles agree, calling Israel "a luxuriant vine" or "a spreading vine". Read that way, Hosea's charge is that prosperity itself fed the shrines: the richer the harvest, the more stone pillars went up.

The standard Hebrew dictionaries treat this as a second, unrelated verb, comparing an Arabic verb for lush growth. Older English Bibles instead read the same form as the verb of emptying and rendered it "an empty vine", which turns the accusation inside out: Israel is not overflowing but worthless. Nothing in the spelling settles the question, since the two readings look identical on the page.

The two ideas are also closer than they first seem. A vine pouring out growth and a jar poured empty both turn on contents running out, and Nahum uses the emptying verb in the same breath as a vine's ruined branches. That is why the older reading has never entirely died out, even though the dictionaries now file Hosea's vine under a word of its own.