a breaking: the shattering of something whole, from a snapped bone to the collapse of a whole nation
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled
At its root this word names the result of being broken. The same noun covers a cracked limb, a smashed clay jar, and the downfall of a kingdom, because in each case something once intact has been shattered and cannot simply be put back.
Its most common use is figurative. The prophets, and especially Jeremiah and the book of Lamentations, reach for it again and again to describe national catastrophe: a city overrun, a people crushed, a society in ruins. "The breaking of my people" is their shorthand for total collapse, often paired with the language of an open wound that no one can heal.
The word also reaches inward and toward individuals. Pride that runs ahead of a person's ruin, and a cutting word that crushes someone's spirit, are both described as this kind of breaking. The thread tying every use together is the same: wholeness violently undone.
Nuances
1aa physical fracture or break: a snapped bone, a maimed limb, or a shattered object
Lev 21:19 (2×)Lev 22:22Lev 24:20 (2×)Job 41:25(17)Isa 30:14
1bruin, downfall, catastrophe: the collapse of a nation, city, or person
1ca crushing of the spirit: inner brokenness caused by harsh words
Pro 15:4*
2
the interpretation of a dream: the unlocking of what a dream means
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintyStrong
In one place the word does not mean a breaking at all but the meaning of a dream, the way a code is broken open to reveal its message. When Gideon overhears an enemy soldier recount a dream and another soldier explain it, the explanation is called the dream's breaking.
This use is rare enough that scholars debate whether it is a stretched sense of the ordinary word for breaking or a separate word that only looks the same. Either way the sense itself is clear: it is the solution or meaning drawn out of the dream.
Names the breaking itself, the fracture or shattering, as of a snapped bone in a body.Lev 24:20Lev 21:19
Widens to a collapse or downfall, the ruin that overtakes a person or a nation when everything gives way.Pro 16:18Isa 30:13
Both
Both can name a grievous calamity that falls on the people of God, the disaster they suffer rather than a mere scratch.Jer 30:12
Both appear in the prophets for a hurt so deep there seems to be no remedy, the wound or the breaking that cannot simply be patched over.Jer 30:14Jer 6:14
Names the blow itself, the stroke that someone deals out. It is what a beating, a battle, or a plague does to its victim, with the striker always in view.Deu 25:31Sa 4:8
Used for the defeat one army inflicts on another, a great slaughter dealt in war.Jos 10:201Sa 23:5
Stands beside other words for an open injury, the raw wound or sore left on the body by the blow.Isa 1:6Jer 30:17
שֹׁדviolent devastation or plunder by an attacker; this word stresses the shattered, ruined state that follows
Names the broken state itself: a fracture, a crushing, a thing snapped apart. It is used of a literal broken limb or body and of a shattered object, the damage as it now stands rather than the act that caused it.Lev 21:19Lev 24:20
Becomes the standard word for a nation's collapse and the deep wound of a people, the inward ruin and grief that is felt and mourned, not the enemy who inflicts it.Jer 30:12Lam 2:11Jer 8:21
Reaches into the figurative: a crushed spirit, a broken heart, and pride that goes before a fall, where the point is the inner shattering of a person.Pro 15:4Pro 16:18
Both
Both belong to the vocabulary of national catastrophe and appear together in the doom oracles, the violent devastation and the ruin it leaves piled side by side.Isa 60:18
Both ring out as the cry of a falling people, the alarm raised when destruction sweeps through the land.Jer 48:3
Names the violent act of an aggressor: ravaging, plundering, laying waste. The focus is on the destroyer and the wreckage done to others, often paired with bloodshed and robbery as a charge against the wicked.Amo 3:10Hab 1:3Pro 24:2
Stands for the predatory oppression that crushes the poor and helpless, the wrong that cries out for rescue.Psa 12:5Pro 21:7
Functions as a near-name for the day of judgment, the coming devastation that falls like a storm from the Almighty.Isa 13:6Jol 1:15
Covers injury to a body: a broken limb that bars a priest from serving, a defect that disqualifies an animal for offering, and the fracture repaid in the measure-for-measure law.Lev 21:19Lev 22:22Lev 24:20
Names the violent moment of smashing and even the noise it makes, from pottery shattered past use to a crash heard rolling down from the hills.Isa 30:14Zep 1:10Job 41:25
Carries the whole downfall of a person or a nation, the ruin that arrogance and wrongdoing bring on, which is why English Bibles often render it "destruction" here.Pro 16:18Pro 18:12Isa 1:28Jer 4:6
Describes damage felt inside a person: a crushed spirit, a cry wrung out of the heart, grief the prophet says has broken him along with his people.Pro 15:4Isa 65:14Jer 8:21Lam 2:11
Reaches damage past mending, where what is needed is a cure rather than workmanship, and the complaint is that no cure exists or that the wound was treated too lightly.Jer 30:12Jer 6:14Nam 3:19
Both
Both name a real gap in something built, a wall or a house that has given way and now shows where it failed.2Ki 12:12Isa 30:13
Both can be spoken of as something to be closed up again, whether by workmen sent to repair it or by God binding it up.2Ki 12:5Isa 30:26
Both assume a whole that has been damaged, so each word points the reader back to the sound original as much as to the harm.2Ki 22:5Psa 60:2
Belongs to the language of upkeep and money: it turns up inside arrangements for collecting silver and paying workers to put a building back in order.2Ki 12:52Ki 12:72Ki 22:5
Names the damaged spot as a standing condition of the structure, something inspected and budgeted for over years, not the instant when something gave way.2Ki 12:62Ki 12:82Ki 12:12
Reaches beyond buildings to a ship's leaking seams, where a named trade of workmen exists precisely to close the gaps.Ezk 27:9Ezk 27:27
Stays with things that can be mended by hand: in every use the damage is fixable with timber, stone and labor, and it is never applied to a person, a nation, or a state of mind.2Ki 12:122Ki 22:5
Is first of all a literal break: a snapped bone in a body, an injury the law measures out matter for matter, a clay jar smashed past mending, a bulging wall that suddenly gives way.Lev 21:19Lev 24:20Isa 30:14
Because it is a break, it can be treated, bound up, or healed, and the prophets argue over whether anyone is actually curing it.Jer 30:12Jer 6:14Nam 3:19
Carries the noise of collapse, the crash heard from the hills and the shout of alarm that runs ahead of an invading army.Zep 1:10Jer 48:5
Reaches inward to a crushed inner life, the spirit that a cruel tongue snaps or that grief leaves broken.Pro 15:4Isa 65:14
Both
Both name the downfall that overtakes wrongdoers, the end their own conduct earns them, and English Bibles render both as "destruction," so the two are indistinguishable on the page.Pro 21:15Pro 16:18
Both name a calamity that Isaiah promises will never come near the restored city again, listed among the disasters its people will stop having to brace for.Isa 54:14Isa 60:18
Both can describe the collapse of an entire realm rather than one person's misfortune, the fortresses reduced to rubble and the land overrun.Psa 89:40Jer 4:20
Names the dread itself, the fear a person feels or the horror a person becomes to others, not only the damage done. Jeremiah begs God not to turn into the thing he is afraid of, and fallen Moab is left as a spectacle that appalls everyone around it.Jer 17:17Jer 48:39
Belongs above all to the wisdom writings, where it is the self-inflicted ruin a person talks himself into. Seven of its eleven appearances are in Proverbs, and the ruin is regularly traced to the mouth.Pro 18:7Pro 13:3
Can describe ruin as a standing condition of life rather than a single catastrophe, the poverty that is itself a poor man's undoing.Pro 10:15
Names a plain bodily fracture in legal texts, a broken foot or hand, and the break that must be repaid with an equal break.Lev 21:19Lev 24:20
Belongs to the language of treatment, so it is something that can be bandaged, healed, or left with no relief at all.Isa 30:26Jer 6:14Nam 3:19
Covers the smashing of a made object, a potter's jar shattered so finely that no piece is left big enough to carry a coal or scoop water.Isa 30:14
Reaches inward to a crushed spirit, the damage a twisted tongue does and the pain people wail over.Pro 15:4Isa 65:14
Has one use with no ruin in it at all, where the breaking is the cracking open of a dream's meaning, what English Bibles render "interpretation".Jdg 7:15
Both
Both name the ruin of a city or nation as a public disaster, announced by the shaking and the outcry of everyone who hears of it.Ezk 26:15Zep 1:10
Both serve the wisdom sayings as the end that overtakes the proud and the wicked, the collapse the righteous live to see.Pro 29:16Pro 16:18
Can name the fallen thing itself, the body or the toppled trunk left lying where it came down, so that someone turns aside to look at it or birds settle on it.Jdg 14:8Ezk 31:13
Pictures ruin as a toppling from a height, so what comes down is a towering tree, a proud sea power, or a king, and never something merely snapped or cracked.Ezk 31:16Ezk 32:10
Works as a dated event, the day the great one goes down, which the prophets use to fix the moment other nations tremble.Ezk 26:18Ezk 27:27
shever in the other biblical languages
σύντριμμαGreek“ruin”the Greek word for a crushing or shattering, used of destruction and of a broken spirit, the closest counterpart to this word's range of ruin
A physical fracture in the body, a broken bone or a torn limb that disqualifies a man from priestly service or a beast from sacrifice.Lev 21:19Lev 22:22Lev 24:20
The crushing of a nation or city in war: a smashing blow so great it cannot be patched, often pictured as a wound that no one can heal.Jer 30:12Jer 30:15Lam 2:11Lam 2:13Nam 3:19
The downfall a proud heart brings on itself, where breaking is the consequence that follows arrogance.Pro 16:18Pro 17:19Pro 18:12
Both
Both name ruin left in the wake of human wickedness: the Greek word renders the Hebrew in the very line Paul quotes (ruin and misery on their paths), so the New Testament word carries the Hebrew picture of lives that leave devastation behind.Isa 59:7Rom 3:16
Both speak of a shattering so total that it is paired with grief and loss, not a damage that can simply be repaired but a collapse that leaves misery in its place.Isa 51:19Rom 3:16
Appears once in the New Testament, inside a string of quoted lines describing people whose lives leave wreckage behind them: ruin and misery mark the roads they walk.Rom 3:16
What scholars say about shever
The standard lexica (BDB, HALOT, DCH) treat שֶׁבֶר as the verbal noun of the root meaning to break, with a unified range running from concrete fracture (of bone or vessel) through the dominant figurative sense of national or personal ruin, the crushing collapse that fills the oracles of judgment in Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Lamentations. The lexica catalogue a distinct nuance of inner breaking (Proverbs 15:4). The use in Judges 7:15 for the interpretation of a dream is set apart: HALOT and BDB note it as a separate sense, and some scholars posit a homonym, though most treat it as a figurative extension of breaking open. The grain or corn sense belongs to the separate but identically spelled noun listed under a different Strong's number, not to this word.