shevut

This word almost always appears in a set phrase, literally something like "turn the turning," that means to reverse a disaster and restore what was lost. Older Bibles rendered it "bring again the captivity," reading it as the return of exiles, but the phrase is used in places where no captivity was ever in view: God restores the fortunes of Job, a man who was never a prisoner, and of Sodom, a city that was destroyed rather than deported. It is also used before the Babylonian exile ever happened and of foreign nations who were never carried off to Babylon. So its core sense is broader than captivity: it names a decisive turnaround, a reversal of a decreed judgment or a wrecked condition back to flourishing.

The reversal is always God's doing, and it carries the weight of covenant hope: the God who brought the ruin is the one who turns it around. In the book of Jeremiah, where the phrase clusters most thickly, the fortunes being restored do specifically include bringing the exiles home from Babylon, so there the older "captivity" reading and the broader "fortunes" reading point at the same event. But the phrase itself names the reversal, not the captivity, and elsewhere the ruin being reversed is something else entirely.

Because it is a fixed idiom rather than an ordinary noun, no single English word captures it. Translators reach for "restore the fortunes," "restore the well-being," or the older "bring again the captivity," and each catches only part of it.

In one place the word steps outside the fixed phrase and carries its plainer, concrete sense: captivity, the condition of people taken as prisoners of war. In the taunt-song against Moab, Moab's daughters are given "into captivity" to an enemy king. Here the word means simple deportation, with none of the turnaround sense it carries in the idiom.

This concrete use is important for the long-running debate over the word. It is the strongest evidence that a "captivity" meaning is genuinely present in the language, and it is the sense that older translators generalized to every occurrence, reading even the reversal-idiom as "return the captivity."