ḥarev

Both times this word describes food, it marks the absence of oil. In the instructions for the grain offering it is the plain alternative to a portion soaked in oil, and in the proverb it is bread eaten with nothing on it.

So the word signals plainness rather than thirst. A dry offering is not a defective one and a dry crust is still food. What the word says is that nothing rich has been added.

The proverb turns that plainness into a comparison: the barest food in a quiet house beats a table loaded with meat in a home full of quarreling. Hebrew has an ordinary adjective for dryness (יָבֵשׁ), used of withered plants and dry ground, and that one never carries this word's other meaning of a place in ruins.

When this word describes a place rather than food, it names the aftermath of destruction. A city lies wrecked with its gates burned, a countryside has neither people nor animals left in it, towns stand as rubble waiting to be rebuilt. The word covers both halves of that picture, the physical damage and the emptiness, which is why the prophets pair it with promises of rebuilding and repopulating.

It also stretches to something quieter. In Haggai the temple is described this way while the people live in finished, paneled houses of their own. That building is not necessarily a smoking heap of stone; it is simply left as it is, unrepaired, while attention goes elsewhere. The same word, a milder situation, and the sting is in the comparison.

Two neighboring Hebrew words fill out the picture. One (שָׁמֵם) often stands right beside this one and adds the shock that a ruin gives the people who look at it. Another, a noun built from the same root (חׇרְבָּה), names the ruin itself, the wrecked place, rather than the condition of being wrecked.