a highway: a built-up, raised public road for travel
This word names a road that has been made, not one that simply wore into the ground. It comes from a verb meaning to bank up or cast up a road, so the picture is of earth heaped and cleared to lift a route above the rough land around it. That is why English often reaches for stronger words than plain road: highway, causeway, or raised way.
Most of the time it is a literal, important road: the main route between towns, the road an army marches on, the built-up approach to the temple. From there it stretches naturally. Because such a road is deliberately prepared for a coming journey, the prophets use it for the road God clears so his scattered people can come home. And because a road is a fixed course, it can name the set track that anything keeps, from the orbits of the stars to the moral direction of a life.
The thread through all of these is a made, ordered way that carries movement toward a destination.