pasturing: the feeding a shepherd provides for his flock, and so both the grazing they live on and the flock that lives on it
This word is built on the ordinary verb for shepherding a flock (רָעָה), and it names the feeding a shepherd does rather than the field he does it in. That is why it never stands on its own. In all ten places it occurs it belongs to somebody: their pasture, my pasture, your pasture, his pasture. It always answers the question whose.
Because it covers the whole business of feeding a flock, it can settle on either end of that business. Isaiah promises returning captives that they will graze along the roads and find their feeding on every bare hill, and Hosea says the people ate their fill of what they were given. Jeremiah, by contrast, says the shepherds were fools and their whole "pasture" was scattered, and only animals scatter. The grazing and the grazers are two sides of one idea, and Hebrew lets the word slide between them.
Six of its ten appearances lock into a single phrase that shaped Israel's worship, "the sheep of your pasture." That phrase does three jobs:
- in prayer it presses a claim on God, asking why he is angry at the very flock he feeds (Psalm 74:1)
- in praise it confesses what Israel is, a people fed by someone other than itself (Psalm 79:13, Psalm 95:7, Psalm 100:3)
- in prophecy it convicts leaders who scattered a flock that was never theirs to begin with (Jeremiah 23:1, Ezekiel 34:31)
In every case the point is ownership rather than scenery. These sheep are fed by this shepherd, so how they are doing is his business, and that is the leverage behind both the prayers and the accusations.