dry, dried out: no longer holding the moisture that once made something green, fresh, or alive, so that it is now brittle, shriveled, or dead
This is the adjective that matches the verb for drying up and withering (יָבֵשׁ). The verb tracks the process; the adjective names the state left behind, once the moisture is gone and what remains is brittle, shriveled, or dead. It appears only ten times, and in every one of them the thing called dry was formerly green, fresh, or living.
Most of those uses are ordinary and physical:
- dead wood and stubble, light enough for the wind to carry and quick to catch fire
- grapes dried for keeping, where the dryness is the whole point rather than a loss
- bones and skin dried out by death or by long hunger
Two uses reach further than that. A man with no children calls himself a dry tree, meaning his family line stops with him. A hungry crowd in the wilderness says its appetite has gone dry, meaning nothing on offer is worth eating. In both cases the picture of a plant with no sap left is doing the work.
The Hebrew Bible repeatedly sets this word directly against its opposite, the word for green and full of sap (לַח). Fire eats the green tree and the dry one alike, and the person under a Nazirite vow may eat neither fresh grapes nor dried. That pairing is what makes the force of the word clear: dry is not simply a lack of water but the end of a life the thing once had.