forcible devastation: the ruin of violent plundering, whether the destroying act or the havoc it leaves behind
This word names destruction with a violent hand behind it. It is not decay, accident, or a quiet fading away, but the ruin that comes when someone strong tears down and carries off what belongs to someone weaker. Because that ruin can be viewed from either end, the word points two directions at once: at the plundering and oppression that people commit, and at the devastation that people suffer.
When the prophets look at the acting end, the word means violent robbery and the crushing of the poor. It is what the powerful store up in their strongholds and what fills a guilty city. When they look at the receiving end, the same word means the sweeping calamity that falls, often as God's judgment, leaving fields, cities, and fortresses in ruins. The two shades are really one idea seen from opposite sides, which is why a single Hebrew word can carry both.
It often travels in a fixed pair with another word for violence, chamas, as a set phrase meaning something like total havoc, and it is paired with a word for shattering, shever, to describe complete collapse. The prophets also play on its sound: twice they call the coming ruin destruction (shod) from the Almighty (Shaddai), a deliberate echo of the two similar-sounding words rather than any change in meaning.