overthrow: the catastrophic overturning of a city or a countryside, leaving it burned out and empty for good
This noun comes from the verb for turning something over (הָפַךְ), the verb used of flipping a dish upside down or tipping a chariot on its side. Turned on a city, the picture is not a defeat that a place recovers from and not a change of rulers. It is a whole landscape flipped over and left that way: the ground salted, nothing growing, nobody moving back in.
Five of the word's six appearances sit inside one fixed phrase, "like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah." The prophets treat that single event as the measuring stick, and each of them holds it up against a different target:
- Babylon at the height of its splendor (Isaiah 13:19; Jeremiah 50:40)
- Edom, confident behind its rock strongholds (Jeremiah 49:18)
- Israel itself, told plainly that it is not exempt (Amos 4:11)
- the covenant land, if the people break faith (Deuteronomy 29:23)
The details the prophets attach to the phrase show what the word is carrying: sulfur and salt over the whole ground, nothing sown and nothing sprouting (Deuteronomy 29:23), and no one settling there or even passing the night again (Jeremiah 49:18; Jeremiah 50:40). The sixth use, Isaiah 1:7, is the one place the word steps outside that comparison, describing a countryside stripped by foreign invaders while its owners watch.