a branch: the leafy limb a tree or vine puts out, the growth that carries its shade and its fruit
All seven times this word appears it means an ordinary branch: the leafy limb that grows out from a trunk or a vine stem. What is unusual is the company it keeps. Six of the seven sit inside a picture of a nation, a king, or a land drawn as a tree, and in those pictures the branches are the part that tells you whether the tree is alive.
Three of them pair branches with fruit, and the pairing is the whole point:
- a vine transplanted into good soil so that it will grow branches and bear fruit (Ezekiel 17:8)
- a cedar shoot planted on Israel's high mountain, which will lift branches and make fruit (Ezekiel 17:23)
- the mountains of Israel, promised that they will put out their branches and give their fruit to the people coming home (Ezekiel 36:8)
Two more use branches to measure size rather than harvest. Assyria stands as a cedar in Lebanon, beautiful in its branches, tall and casting shade (Ezekiel 31:3), and the vine carried out of Egypt spreads until the hills are under its shadow and its branches are like the mighty cedars (Psalm 80:10). Malachi runs the picture in reverse: the coming day burns so completely that the arrogant are left neither root nor branch. Only Leviticus 23:40 puts the word in a human hand, where boughs of leafy trees are gathered for the week of the festival.
Hebrew has several words for the growth on a tree, and they are not interchangeable. One of them names the long trailing shoots that hang and reach (דָּלִיּוֹת), and it stands right beside our word in Ezekiel 17:23, where the cedar lifts up branches while the birds nest in the shade of those shoots. Another names a vine twig, the kind that gets pruned off and burned (זְמוֹרָה). This word is the limb itself, leaves and all.