ya'ar

In the Bible a forest is untamed country. It is where you go to fell timber, where wild animals roam, and where armies can get lost or trapped. Unlike a planted orchard or a tended vineyard, a forest grows on its own, dense and uncleared, often on the hill country that no one had yet farmed.

Because a forest is so plainly a mass of standing trees, the prophets reach for it again and again as a picture. A proud army or a great nation is a forest, and God's judgment is the fire or the axe that levels it: when the trees come crashing down, so do the people. The same image runs the other way too. A forest is the lair of the lion and the wild beast, so to send a people into the forest, or to leave them at the mercy of what lives there, is to picture danger and ruin.

The word also names the trees as material. Cedar cut from the forest of Lebanon built Solomon's palace, which was itself nicknamed the House of the Forest. The same standing timber, carved and overlaid, becomes the wooden idol the prophets mock.

A handful of passages use a word spelled the same way to mean a honeycomb, the waxy comb dripping with wild honey that a person finds in open country. Lexicons treat this as a separate word that only looks identical to the word for forest, since a comb of honey and a stand of trees share no common idea.

The clearest case is the lover in the Song of Songs who eats his honeycomb with his honey. The honey episode in Saul's day is debated: many translators read it as honey lying on the ground of a wood, while others take the same word there as the honeycomb itself.