the open ground marked off around Ezekiel's temple: a strip deliberately kept clear and off limits.
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong
Seven times Ezekiel's guided tour of the future temple names this one area, and every time he calls it "the" one, as if his hearers already knew which ground he meant. It runs alongside the sanctuary, with a puzzling structure the text calls simply "the building" standing on the far side of it toward the west, and the measuring line runs a hundred cubits across it.
What the ground is for becomes clear from who is allowed near it. The rooms that face it are the holy rooms where the priests eat the most holy offerings and store them, the part of the complex ordinary worshippers never enter. So the emptiness is the point. The area works as a buffer, a band of open ground that holds normal traffic at a distance from the holiest place.
That is why the older English "separate place" catches something the newer "courtyard" loses, odd as it sounds. A court (חָצֵר) is somewhere people gather. This is ground marked off so that they do not.
the shape of a person's body as the eye takes it in: their figure or build.
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyContested
Lamentations 4:7 remembers Jerusalem's young leaders as they used to look: purer than snow, whiter than milk, more ruddy than coral, and, in the last words of the line, sapphire was their figure. The same word that maps out ground in Ezekiel here traces the outline of a human body.
What holds the two uses together is not the act of cutting but the clean edge a cut leaves behind. A piece hacked off something (גֶּזֶר) is the cut thing itself, while this word names the shape the cutting produces, whether that is a boundary on the ground or a silhouette against the light. Exactly what the poet saw in sapphire is still argued, and the old rendering "their polishing was of sapphire" preserves one guess at it.
Names a marked off yard inside the temple grounds, a space the building plan measures and locates: the report gives its width, and the surrounding structures are described by which side of it they face. English Bibles usually render it "separate place".Ezk 41:12Ezk 41:13Ezk 42:1
The set apart ground it names is a working part of the sanctuary, not empty land: the rooms alongside it are where the priests eat the holiest offerings and leave their garments.Ezk 42:13
It can also name the cut shape of a human body, the carved looking figure of Jerusalem's young men, rendered "form" or "polished figure". The idea of cutting has moved from ground to a person's outline.Lam 4:7
Both
Both grow out of the picture of cutting, and both name something set apart from everything around it: a yard walled off within the temple grounds, and a stretch of land cut off from where people live.Ezk 41:12Lev 16:22
Both belong to the language of holiness in practice. One marks the ground beside which the priests handle the holiest offerings, the other marks where guilt is carried off on the day the nation is cleansed.Ezk 42:13Lev 16:22
Names open country cut off from settled life, the far place the goat is sent to while carrying the people's guilt, rendered "a land not inhabited" or "a solitary land". The separating points outward, away from the camp, rather than fencing off a spot inside a holy building.Lev 16:22
It describes the character of a whole region rather than a measured area: nothing is said about its size, its shape, or where it begins and ends, only that no one lives there.Lev 16:22
חָצֵרthe walled court where people actually gather, while this word names the open ground kept clear of them
Names ground that is meant to stay empty. The strip is described by what borders it and by how wide it is, never by anyone using it, and the rooms facing it are the ones where only the priests eat and store the holiest offerings, so the open space works as a gap that keeps everyone else back.Ezk 41:12Ezk 42:13
It is an area rather than an enclosure. Nothing is ever said to fence it in, no wall, hanging, gate, or doorway; it is located instead by what stands beside it, the temple on one side and a building on the other.Ezk 41:13Ezk 41:14
Outside the temple vision the word leaves architecture behind and traces the outline of a human body, remembering how Jerusalem's young leaders once looked.Lam 4:7
Both
Both name open ground inside Ezekiel's temple complex rather than a roofed room, which is why the guided tour walks through one to reach the other and English versions often blur the pair, one rendered "court" and the other "separate place" or "yard".Ezk 41:15Ezk 42:1
Both are fixed points in the layout that measure how close a person may come, since the priests' rooms are placed by naming each one: the chambers sit along the wall of the one and face the other.Ezk 42:10
This is a yard people are invited into. Worshippers walk through its gates, stand in it, sing in it, and long to be there, and it can also be trampled by the wrong sort of worship.Psa 100:4Psa 84:10Isa 1:12
It reaches far beyond the sanctuary to any walled yard attached to a building: the inner court of a palace where an uninvited visitor risks death, the guarded yard where a prophet is held, even the yard of an ordinary house with a well in it.Est 5:1Jer 32:22Sa 17:18
In its second sense it stops being part of a building at all and becomes a place on the map, the open settlement or cluster of homes listed alongside towns and set against houses that have a wall around them.Gen 25:16Lev 25:31Jos 15:32
גֶּזֶרa physical piece cut off from something, like the halved animals of Abraham's covenant, rather than an area or an outline
Names open space rather than a solid object. On Ezekiel's tour of the future temple it is the ground running alongside the sanctuary, measured with a line the way a room is measured, yet holding nothing.Ezk 41:13Ezk 42:1
The separating it describes is about who may come near, not about something being broken up. The ground it names lies beside the rooms where the priests eat the most holy offerings, and it stays clear so that ordinary worshippers keep their distance.Ezk 42:13Ezk 41:12
It can also trace the outline of a human body. Lamentations remembers Jerusalem's young men and compares their figure to sapphire, a use that no piece of anything would fit.Lam 4:7
Both
Both are built on the picture of cutting, and neither one is the word for the act of cutting. Each names what the cut leaves behind, in one case the piece and in the other the boundary.Gen 15:17Ezk 41:12
Both assume a whole that has been divided, whether that is water driven into separate parts or a strip of ground held apart from everything around it.Psa 136:13Ezk 42:10
Names a solid piece that has been cut off something larger, a thing with weight and edges. In the covenant ceremony the animals are split and the halves laid opposite each other, and this is the word for those halves, usually rendered "piece".Gen 15:17
It never appears as a single item, because one cut always makes at least two. The psalm says God cut the Red Sea into parts, and the word counts the parts rather than naming the water.Psa 136:13
Both of its uses sit inside a scene where something is being divided right then, a covenant ritual and a sea driven apart, so the dividing is still happening around the word.Gen 15:17Psa 136:13
gizrah in the other biblical languages
μορφήGreek“form”the Greek word for the outward form a thing shows, close to the Lamentations use, but with none of the sense of ground marked off
In seven of its eight appearances the Hebrew word has nothing to do with how anything looks. It marks out a strip of open ground in Ezekiel's temple plan, ground that has measurements, a building standing beyond it, and rooms that face it. The Greek word is never used of a plot of land or of a boundary on the ground.Ezk 41:12Ezk 41:13Ezk 42:1Ezk 42:13
Every use of the Hebrew word turns on an edge that sets one thing off from another, which is why the same word can mark off a patch of ground and trace the outline of a body. The Greek word carries no such idea of being cut off from what surrounds it.Ezk 41:14Lam 4:7
Both
Both words can name the shape a human figure presents to the eye, and the Greek word is the natural counterpart for that one Hebrew use: it is the word a Greek writer reaches for when describing the build or appearance of a person. Lamentations remembers Jerusalem's young leaders and says sapphire was their figure, and Mark says the risen Jesus was seen by two of his followers in a different form. In both places what is in view is how someone appeared.Lam 4:7Mrk 16:12
English Bibles reach for the same word, "form", to render both: Lamentations praises the form of Jerusalem's young men, and Philippians speaks of the form of God. The overlap is real but narrow, since it touches only one of the Hebrew word's eight appearances while it runs through every use of the Greek one.Lam 4:7Php 2:6
The Greek word can name the standing and the nature that a form expresses, not only how something looks. Paul sets the form of God against the form of a servant to say who Christ already was and what he willingly became, so the word carries the whole weight of a status. The Hebrew word never reaches that far, staying with shapes and boundaries a person can see and measure.Php 2:6Php 2:7
The Greek word describes a form that can be taken on or exchanged for another. Jesus is seen by two travelers in a different one after the resurrection, and Christ takes on the form of a servant. Nothing in the Hebrew word suggests a shape that could be swapped; it names a shape as it stands.Mrk 16:12Php 2:7
What scholars say about gizrah
A feminine noun formed from the root gzr, "to cut, divide," attested eight times. The standard lexica keep both uses under one head while separating the senses: BDB gives "separate place" for the seven Ezekiel occurrences and "figure, shape" for Lamentations 4:7; HALOT glosses it as a separated or restricted area, and as figure; DCH follows the same division. In Ezekiel 41-42 the term belongs to the technical vocabulary of the measured vision, standing beside the equally opaque binyan, "the building," and commentators on the temple plan (Cooke, Zimmerli, Block) differ over the extent of the area it designates, whether a western yard alone or a continuous set-apart band around the sanctuary; the rooms said to face it in 42:13 are the priestly chambers for the most holy offerings, which supports a restrictive rather than merely spatial reading. The Lamentations occurrence is the sole attestation of the sense figure or form, and the comparison with sapphire (lapis lazuli) has drawn competing explanations in the commentary literature, among them the outline of the body, the luster of the skin, and the dark colour of the hair; the Authorized Version's "polishing" reflects an older attempt to make the mineral comparison work.
Sources
BDB, s.v. גִּזְרָהlexicon
HALOT, s.v. גִּזְרָהlexicon
DCH, s.v. גִּזְרָהlexicon
G. A. Cooke, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, ICC (1936)commentary
Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, Chapters 25-48, Hermeneia (1983)commentary
Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 25-48, NICOT (1998)commentary
Delbert R. Hillers, Lamentations, Anchor Bible, 2nd ed. (1992)commentary
Adele Berlin, Lamentations, Old Testament Library (2002)commentary