open grazing country: the wide pasture lands a flock is turned out on, and by extension the whole territory a people lives off
This word never stands on its own. It turns up only in the plural and always tied to a second word: the pastures of the wilderness, the pastures of the shepherds, the pastures of Jacob. What it names is open grazing country, the rough grassland out past the towns where flocks are driven to feed and lie down. It is close kin to the commoner Hebrew word for a settled abode (נָוֶה), but where that word can mean a fold, a house, or even God's own dwelling, this one stays out on the range.
Because that range is where a herding people makes its living, the word slips easily from the grass to the land itself. When a poet says the Lord swallowed up all the pastures of Jacob, or that raiders schemed to seize the pastures of God, the sense is a whole homeland, pictured as the grazing country it survives on.
Almost every use sits inside a scene of ruin, and the word carries that vulnerability with it:
- the grazing land dries up when a curse falls on the country
- fire eats it in a season of drought
- it falls silent once the shepherds are scattered
- it mourns aloud when the Lord roars from Zion
Against that background the one green picture, a flock made to lie down in grassy pastures, reads as pure relief.