tirah

This is a herder's word. It does not picture a walled town or a fortress but the living space of people who move with their flocks: tents pitched together, pens for the animals, a rough ring marking off what belongs to them. Genesis 25:16 sets it right beside the ordinary word for a settled village (חָצֵר), which shows that the two were felt to be different kinds of home.

What happens to these camps in the text fills in the picture.

• Israel burns the ones belonging to Midian, so they were made of things that burn.
• Ezekiel says herders from the east will pitch theirs inside Ammon and eat its fruit, which is what people who follow their flocks do to a conquered land.
• A psalm prays that an enemy's camp be left empty, with no one still living in his tents (אֹהֶל).

Chronicles stretches the word one step further. The towns the Levites received by lot are called their encampments, an area they lived in for good rather than a camp they struck and moved. The old herding word had become a plain way of saying where a family group lives.

When the New Testament quotes that psalm in Acts 1:20, the Greek word it uses means a homestead or living quarters (ἔπαυλις), which keeps the sense of a dwelling place left standing empty.

Twice the word describes nothing like a camp but something built. In Ezekiel's vision of the temple kitchens, cooking places are set under stonework that runs around all four corner courts. The same verse also uses the plain word for a row or course of stones (טוּר), and that neighboring word is the best clue we have to what the rarer one means here.

In the Song of Songs, the brothers say that if their sister is a wall they will build on her a turret of silver. The picture is of something raised on top of a wall, and the next verse compares her to towers (מִגְדָּל). Whether the thing built is a battlement, a low parapet, or an applied ornament is worked out from the setting, not from the word.

Both uses fit one simple idea: a line that runs around something. Stones laid in a course around a building do that, and so does a ring of tents around a clan's animals and goods. That link is why dictionaries keep all seven verses under one word. Still, only these two verses are about building, and they are the two hardest verses the word appears in.