exile: being carried off to a foreign land, and the community of those carried off
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled
This is the standard biblical word for the great deportation, when Babylon emptied Judah of its people and dragged them away from their land. It works the way the English word "the captivity" does. It can name the event and condition itself, the state of having been forced from home, and it can also name the people who lived through it, the deported community.
Those two ideas are really one. The deportation creates the deportees, so the same word swings between the act and the people it produces, depending on the sentence. When a prophet says a city will "go into exile," the word points to the experience; when Ezra speaks of "the people of the exile," it points to the group of returnees who carried that history with them.
A narrower use grows out of the same picture. The phrase translated "baggage for exile" means the small bundle a person packs when they are about to be marched away as a prisoner, the gear of someone going into captivity. The prophet Ezekiel is even told to pack such a bundle in public as a living sign of the coming deportation.
Nuances
1athe act and condition of being carried off to a foreign land
Names the exiles as a settled community, a body of people living together in deportation: the returning assembly in Ezra and the fellow deportees among whom Ezekiel lived.Ezr 2:1Ezk 11:24
Used for the act of going into exile itself, the carrying away of a people from their land.Nam 3:10Amo 1:15
Both
Both name those carried off into the Babylonian captivity, the population stripped from Judah and resettled abroad.Est 2:6Jer 52:31
Marks the deportation as a fixed point in time, the event used to count years from, as in dating Ezekiel's visions by the years since the king and people were carried off.Ezk 1:2Ezk 33:21Ezk 40:1
שְׁבִיcaptivity or captives taken in war as plunder, stressing being seized as a prisoner rather than the Babylonian deportation itself
Names the deported community as a body of people: the exiles as a settled group living away from home, with their own institutions and assemblies.Ezr 1:11Ezr 6:19Ezr 6:21
Becomes a near technical term for the specific Babylonian deportation of Judah and those who lived through it, the people the prophets address as the exile generation.Jer 29:1Jer 29:4Ezk 1:1Ezk 3:15
Both
Both can name the returning Judean deportees in the same passage, where the captured people and the exile community are one and the same group.Ezr 2:1Neh 7:6Ezr 8:35
Both describe the catastrophe of a population carried off into captivity by a conquering power, the loss of a people from their land.Ezk 12:11Nam 3:10
Names captivity as the condition that results from being seized in war, the fate of those carried off as prisoners by an enemy army.Num 21:1Deu 28:41Jer 15:2
Covers war captives taken as plunder, the human spoil a victorious army leads away, used widely outside the Babylonian exile.Num 31:12Deu 21:10Isa 49:24
Names the deported people as a standing community with a life of its own. They rebuild the temple, keep Passover together, and can shut a man out of their assembly, so the word works as the name of a body of people and not only as something that happened to them.Ezr 4:1Ezr 6:19Ezr 10:8
Also names the deportation itself, the fate a nation walks into. A king goes into it along with his priests and officials, and half of Jerusalem goes out into it, with no captor and no prisoners in view at all.Amo 1:15Jer 49:3Zec 14:2
Stretches even to the gear of leaving. The prophet packs what the text calls an exile's baggage and hauls it through a hole in the wall as a sign, and Egypt is told to pack the same bundle.Ezk 12:3Ezk 12:7Jer 46:19
Has an address and a road home. The prophet lives among these people by the river Chebar and is sent to speak to them, and years later the same people come back up from Babylon to Jerusalem.Ezk 1:1Ezk 3:11Ezr 1:11Neh 7:6
Both
Both name people carried off from home by a victorious army, the human cost left over after a defeat.2Ki 24:142Ch 28:5
Both fall on foreign nations as well as on God's own people. Moab hears both words in one long oracle against it.Jer 48:7Jer 48:46
Counts people as part of the haul from a battle, named in the same breath as the goods. The soldiers set the prisoners down next to the plunder, and Nehemiah asks God to hand his enemies over as loot in what he calls a "land of captivity".2Ch 28:14Neh 4:4
Keeps the prisoners in their captors' hands, close enough to be handed back. Israel is ordered to return them, and the men then clothe them, feed them, and carry the ones who cannot walk home on donkeys.2Ch 28:112Ch 28:15
Can narrow to one person inside the crowd of prisoners, as when a soldier sees a beautiful woman among them and wants to marry her.Deu 21:11
Belongs to the raw aftermath of the fighting, paired with the corpses as the sword drinks its fill.Deu 32:42
golah in the other biblical languages
μετοικεσίαGreek“deportation”the Greek term for the deportation, used in the New Testament specifically for the carrying away of Judah to Babylon
can name the deported people themselves as a community, not only the event, so it points to the returned exiles who carried that history homeEzr 6:19Ezk 1:1
stretches to the small bundle a captive packs to be marched away, the gear of someone going into exileJer 46:19Ezk 12:3
Both
both name the one great forced removal of Judah to Babylon, when the people were torn from their land2Ki 24:15Mat 1:12
Refers concretely to the Babylonian exile and the community of Judeans carried off in it, the specific deportation of king and people from Jerusalem.2Ki 24:15Ezk 1:1
Becomes almost a name for the returning exile community itself, the people of the deportation as an identifiable group in their own land afterward.Ezr 2:1Neh 7:6
Both
Both name the state of being carried off into captivity, a people or person taken away as prisoners by a conquering power.2Ki 24:14Rev 13:10
Names captivity in the abstract or as a body of captives, with no tie to one historical deportation. It can even be lifted into a picture of Christ leading captured enemies in a victory parade.Eph 4:8
Used as a general principle of fate: whoever takes others captive will themselves be taken captive. The word states the condition of captivity itself, not a particular nation's experience of it.Rev 13:10
What scholars say about golah
The standard lexica (BDB, HALOT, DCH) treat גּוֹלָה as a single feminine noun built on the root גלה "to be uncovered, to go into exile," with two principal uses related by metonymy: the abstract "exile, deportation, captivity" and the concrete collective "the exiles, the deportees." In the Ezra-Nehemiah literature the phrase בְּנֵי הַגּוֹלָה, "the people of the exile," becomes a near-technical designation for the returned community. The phrase כְּלֵי גוֹלָה (Jer 46:19;Ezek 12:3-4) denotes an exile's pack, the baggage of one going into captivity. The near-synonym גָּלוּת (H1546) overlaps closely, while שְׁבִי (H7628) emphasizes captives taken in war.