the rule of one named king or royal house: the realm he governed, the royal power he held, or the years he reigned
Every one of the nine times this word appears, it is tied to somebody in particular: the kingdom of Og, the kingdom of Sihon, the kingdom of Israel, the kingdom of my father, the kingdom of the house of Israel, the reign of Jehoiakim. It never stands on its own as "a kingdom" in the abstract. Rule, in this word, always belongs to someone, which is why it can be measured out, torn away, restored, or brought to an end.
The nine uses spread across three shades, running from the most concrete to the most abstract:
- the land itself, as when Joshua divides up all the kingdom of Og in Bashan among the tribes and lists its cities
- the royal power itself, as when Samuel tells Saul that the LORD has torn the kingdom of Israel away from him and given it to a better man
- the length of a reign used as a date, as in the opening words of Jeremiah 26, in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim
Five of the nine sit in a single stretch of Joshua 13, where the land east of the Jordan is being parceled out, so the word carries a strong flavor of territory being surveyed and assigned. The other four move the idea inward, to the right to rule that a dynasty either keeps or loses.
The ordinary Hebrew word for a kingdom is מַמְלָכָה, which is far more common, stands freely on its own, and turns up in the plural for the kingdoms of the earth. Two more words in the same family divide the idea up differently: מַלְכוּת leans toward royal splendor and the dating of a reign, and מְלוּכָה toward the royal office itself. The differences among the four are matters of habit and shading rather than separate ideas.