dryness at its harshest: the scorching heat of the sun, the drought of withheld rain, or a place dried up into ruin
At its root this word is about dryness, and it stretches to cover everything that dryness touches. The blaze of the midday sun, a season when the rains fail, and a city left in rubble are all, in Hebrew, versions of the same idea: something scorched, drained, and stripped of life.
The most physical use is the parching heat of the day. Jacob complains that the heat wore him down by day while frost bit him at night (Genesis 31:40), and Isaiah pictures God as a shade that shields his people from the burning sun (Isaiah 4:6).
From there the word moves to drought, the withholding of rain that turns fertile ground barren. When Gideon lays out his fleece, the ground around it stays bone dry (Judges 6:39), and the prophet Haggai reports that God summoned a drought on the land as a judgment (Haggai 1:11).
Its darkest use is desolation, a place so ruined that it has dried up into waste, close in force to the Hebrew word for a heap of ruins (חׇרְבָּה). Bozrah and Egypt are threatened with becoming a byword for ruin (Jeremiah 49:13; Ezekiel 29:10), while the old wastes are rebuilt in Isaiah's promise of restoration (Isaiah 61:4). The thread running through all three senses is the same: life dried out and withdrawn, whether by the sun overhead, by rain that never comes, or by the ruin that war leaves behind.