a permanent holding: what is handed over to a group to keep as its own, most often the land itself
This noun belongs to the family of words for taking land over from whoever held it before, but it does not describe the taking. It names the result. Something has changed hands, and the whole force of the word is that the change is meant to stick.
It occurs only nine times, and the settings are sharp:
- God's promise to Israel, where the land is handed over to be kept for good
- oracles against the nations, where a country is handed to outsiders as a judgment
- one line of old poetry, where what is handed down is not land at all but the instruction given through Moses
Seven of the nine are in Ezekiel, and there the word is a weapon in an argument about who the land actually belongs to. The people still living in the ruins use it to write the exiles out of the promise, the surrounding nations use it to help themselves to what is left, and God answers by turning the same word back on the claimants. That is why it carries more weight than the ordinary word for a legal holding, אֲחֻזָּה, which is at home in a sale contract or a burial plot. It also differs in angle from יְרֻשָּׁה, which looks back at whoever was dispossessed, and from נַחֲלָה, which looks at the share that falls to a particular family.
The one line in Deuteronomy is the reason the word became famous in later Jewish tradition. What the assembly holds forever there is the teaching, not the acreage. It is the same idea stretched to cover something no army can take away.