peri

This is the everyday, physical sense, and it accounts for most of the word's uses. It covers what a tree or vine bears (figs, grapes, pomegranates), what a worked field sends up, and, in an image the writers reach for constantly, what a person or a nation yields when they are drawn as a tree planted somewhere.

The three shades belong together because Hebrew sees one thing in all of them: the visible yield of a living, growing source. A tree's fruit, a field's harvest, and a people rooted and bearing are the same idea applied to a plant, to a field, and to a nation. Other Hebrew words stay narrower. What the soil sends up is יְבוּל, and the harvest once it has been gathered in is תְּבוּאָה, while this word names the fruit itself, wherever it grows.

In the law and the prophets this physical fruit is rarely neutral. A land heavy with fruit is a sign of blessing, and fruit that fails or withers is a sign of judgment. That is what makes the word so ready to carry the deeper senses below, and it is also the point of the polemic running through the prophets: the neighbouring nations credited their harvests to a storm god, and Israel's Scriptures insist on giving every kind of fruitfulness back to the God who made the tree.

Hebrew pictures children as the produce a body brings forth, exactly as a tree brings forth fruit. The set phrase "fruit of the womb" (and its partner "fruit of the body") names a person's children, and the same word covers the young of the flocks and herds. In the blessings and curses of the law these stand side by side with the fruit of the ground as a single bundle: body, beast and soil either flourish together or fail together, and naming all three is a way of saying "everything you have."

Hebrew does not treat this as a figure of speech. When the word means someone's children it is a plain, ordinary use, which is why a writer can move from crops to children within one line without signalling any shift. Where another word names a child as a person (יֶלֶד), or a line of descendants as seed (זֶרַע), this one names them as what a body has produced.

It is the natural opposite of barrenness: where there is no fruit of the womb, there are no children. That is also why the darkest verses in the Bible can use it, describing besieged parents driven to eat their own children.

Building on the picture of a tree, the word names the harvest of a life. An orchard yields the kind of fruit its trees are, and in the same way a person's deeds ripen into a matching outcome. Scripture says plainly that people will eat the fruit of their own ways, and the image cuts both ways: cruelty ripens into ruin, and a life lived well ripens into good.

The same logic reaches three connected places:

• the payback that conduct brings back on the one who acted
• what a person's speech produces, for good or for harm
• the gain that hard work or wisdom finally yields

Because it is the same ordinary word used for crops, the writers can hold justice and farming in one breath. Deeds are the seed, consequences are the harvest, and the crop always matches what was sown. That is the quiet claim behind verses that promise the wicked will eat what they have grown.