the branches of a vine or a tree: the limbs that hang down and spread out from the stem, always used as a picture of a nation or its king
This word names the branches that grow out from a vine or a tree and hang down under their own weight. It belongs to a small group of Hebrew words built on the picture of something let down or dangling, the same idea behind the bucket a person lowers into a well. So these are not stiff twigs but limbs that reach out, droop, and carry the leaves and the fruit.
All eight uses are picture language, and what the picture stands for is always a nation or its royal house:
- a transplanted vine turns its branches toward the eagle who planted it (Ezekiel 17:6 and 17:7)
- a mother vine is admired for the sheer number of its branches (Ezekiel 19:11)
- a young cedar grows wide enough for birds to nest in the shade of its branches (Ezekiel 17:23)
- the towering cedar of Ezekiel's warning to Egypt has its branches broken and left lying in the valleys (Ezekiel 31:12)
- a fine olive tree has its branches ruined when God sets fire to it (Jeremiah 11:16)
Because the branches are what a tree shows the world, they are also how its greatness gets measured. Ezekiel says twice that the great cedar was beautiful in the length of its branches and in the abundance of its branches (31:7 and 31:9), and then says of the same tree that its branches lie broken (31:12). The word keeps turning up right where a kingdom's glory is either on display or being destroyed.
Hebrew has several words in this area, and Ezekiel can use more than one in a single breath. In Ezekiel 17:6 and 31:12 this word stands beside another word for boughs (פֹּארָה), and in Ezekiel 17:23 beside the ordinary everyday word for a branch (עָנָף). The differences between them are slight in these passages, which is why English versions trade "branches" and "boughs" back and forth.