ḥel

Ancient cities were rarely protected by one barrier. Around the foot of the tall city wall builders often raised a second, lower line: an earth bank faced with stone, or a short forward wall, thrown out in front so that an attacker had to break through twice. That outer defense is what this word names, which is why the text can list it beside the main wall (חוֹמָה) as a separate structure, the way Lamentations says that rampart and wall mourn together.

Because it was the first thing a besieging army met, the rampart turns up at the sharp end of a siege. When Joab's men pile a siege ramp (סֹלְלָה) against Abel of Beth-maacah, the ramp comes to rest against the rampart while the rest of the troops batter the main wall. Nahum taunts Thebes, whose rampart was the water around her. The word against Jezebel puts her death at the rampart of Jezreel, on the exposed strip just outside the town.

In the Psalms the same defenses become something to admire and to bless. Worshippers are told to walk around Zion and take careful note of her rampart, and pilgrims pray for peace inside Jerusalem's rampart, where the word covers the whole protected space rather than the stonework itself. Isaiah takes the last step: in his song a strong city's walls and rampart are not masonry at all, but God's own rescue.

Obadiah's closing promise lists groups of displaced Israelites who will come home and take possession of land. In the middle of that list stands a word spelled just like the word for a city's rampart, and it plainly cannot mean a rampart there. The usual reading treats it as a form of the far more common word for strength, wealth, and a fighting force (חַיִל), giving "the exiles of this host of the sons of Israel," meaning this whole deported company.

A second reading holds that a letter has dropped out and that the prophet named Halah, the district in Assyria where northern Israelites were resettled after Samaria fell. Either way the promise itself is unchanged: people carried far away get the land back. What is uncertain is only whether the line names the group of people or the place they were taken to.