a barren waste: empty, waterless country where nothing grows and no one lives
This is the harsh end of the Hebrew desert vocabulary. The everyday word for wilderness (מִדְבָּר) covers the open country beyond the last village, where flocks are still pastured and travellers still pass through. This word names what lies past even that: ground that gives nothing back, with no water, no road, and no one living on it.
It belongs almost entirely to poetry, and it almost always arrives as the second half of a pair, sharpening the line it completes:
- Israel is found in a desert land, in an empty howling waste
- God marches out ahead of his people through the waste
- they grieved him in the wilderness and in the waste
- they wandered in the waste and found no city to live in
Setting the word beside the ordinary term for wilderness is how these writers say that the place was not merely open country but the worst of it. Isaiah then turns the word around: when he promises rivers in the waste, the shock is the word itself, because this is the ground that by definition holds no water.
In six places the word arrives with "the" attached, and there it works as a label for one particular stretch of dead country rather than for desert in general. Two quite different tracts get that same label: the barren land east of the Jordan that Israel and Balaam look down on from the heights of Moab, and the parched country west of the Dead Sea where David hid from Saul. Because one expression covers both, the word is best read as a description doing the work of a name. Many English Bibles simply print it as "Jeshimon," which leaves the reader with an unfamiliar place instead of a vivid word.