ḥatsir

This is by far the common meaning. It names the low green growth of the open country, the pasture and hay that feed livestock. In everyday life it was a plain, useful word: the fresh grass a shepherd cuts and cycles through the seasons, the fodder a king scours the land for in a drought, the daily food God provides for cattle. The word carries no grand overtones in itself; it simply means the green stuff of the field.

Yet Hebrew poetry seized on one obvious fact about grass: it comes up fast and dies fast. In the dry heat of the land, fresh grass can shrivel within hours of the hot east wind. Out of that ordinary observation the poets built the Bible's favorite picture of how short human life is. Grass in the morning, withered by evening, became a fixed image for people, nations, and glory that flourish briefly and then are gone. The same picture could be turned kindly (our days are like grass, but God's faithful love lasts) or sharply (the wicked, the proud, and the enemy will fade like grass).

A related image sharpens the point further: grass that sprouts on a flat rooftop, with almost no soil, and so scorches before it can even form a head of grain. That rooftop grass became a byword for shallow-rooted, doomed effort, whether wished on an enemy or hurled as a taunt at a conquering empire.

All of these are the one word doing one thing: naming grass, then using grass to say something about how fleeting life and power are.

In one place the word does not mean grass at all but a garden vegetable: the leek. It stands in a short list of the foods the Israelites missed from Egypt, alongside cucumbers, melons, onions, and garlic. The setting makes the meaning plain, and the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament already rendered it leek here, matching what we know of the Egyptian laborer's diet, in which leeks, onions, and garlic were staples.

Scholars still debate how this leek is related to the grass word. Some treat it as a natural narrowing of the broad green stuff meaning to one particular green plant, a shift that Aramaic also shows. Others hold that the leek is a genuinely separate word that only happens to look the same, tied instead to a root about narrow, stalk-like shapes. Either way the meaning in this single verse is not in doubt: it is a cultivated food plant, a leek.