ḥarev

This is the word for water disappearing. A flood recedes, a river runs out, a sea is held back, and the bed that held the water is left dry. The picture is the loss of the water itself, and with it the loss of the life that the water supported.

Most often the one drying things up is God. He dries the waters of the flood, rebukes the sea and turns it dry, and threatens to reduce rivers and pools to dust as an act of judgment. The same act can be rescue or ruin depending on who is standing in the dry place. In a few passages a proud king boasts that he has dried up rivers under his own feet, claiming a power that belongs to God alone.

A closely related Hebrew verb (yavesh) also means "to be dry," and the two often stand side by side. This word leans toward the drying up of standing water, where the other can describe ground, plants, or bones going dry.

This is the word for a place being wrecked and emptied of life. A city is reduced to rubble, fields and high places are torn down, and a nation is wiped out so that nothing is left living there. Sometimes the word names the act of laying waste, and sometimes the resulting state of lying in ruins.

The two ideas in this word, drying up and lying in ruins, grow from one root image: a thing emptied out and left barren, whether it is a riverbed with no water or a town with no people. The prophets play on that overlap, picturing judgment as a land both parched and ruined. Because the destruction sense is so common in the prophets, this word becomes a standard term for the desolation that follows conquest.

At its far edge the word slides toward killing. In one scene the Moabite army, seeing the morning sun turn pooled water blood red, cries that the kings have destroyed one another, and in another the prophet commands that a city's warriors be cut down like cattle. The word there carries its sense of devastation right up to "slaughtered," but it is still the same word for being laid waste, not a separate term for killing.