to devastate: to wreck something by violence and strip it bare, the ruin a raiding army leaves behind.
This is the prophets' word for ruin done by force. Nearly half of its uses fall in Jeremiah, where city after city is announced as laid waste and a figure called the destroyer comes up out of the north. The word is never neutral. It names disaster brought by a hostile hand, not loss that simply happens.
Two things happen at once when it is used, and Hebrew keeps them in one word: something whole is wrecked, and something full is emptied out. A town is laid waste overnight, its fields stripped and its people carried off, because the army that ruins a place is usually the same army that loots it. At the edges the same violence shrinks to human size, and the word describes a robber stripping a household, a son turning on his father, or a wolf killing whoever steps outside the gate.
Hebrew keeps a crowded shelf of words for wrecking, and this one sits among them:
- The broader verb for ruining or corrupting (שָׁחַת) can slide from physical damage into moral rot, which this word never does.
- The word for lying desolate or dried up (חָרֵב) looks at the emptiness left behind, where this one looks at the violence that made it.
- "To plunder" (בָּזַז) and "to seize by force" (גָּזַל) watch the loot being carried off rather than the place being wrecked.
- "To tear down" (הָרַס) is about pulling a structure apart stone by stone.
Its sharpest use is a threat that turns back on the one who makes it. Isaiah 33:1 cries woe over the destroyer who has never yet been destroyed, and then promises that he will be. Jeremiah says the same of Babylon: the great wrecker of nations ends up wrecked. The noun built from this verb, "violence" or "havoc" (שֹׁד), names the wreckage itself.
Nuances
Whether the word describes Sisera as simply slain or carries an added note of sexual violation, given the repeated phrase "between her feet".
- majoritySlain or destroyed, in step with the surrounding verbs of sinking and falling, with any suggestiveness left as innuendo only.; Barry G. Webb, The Book of Judges (NICOT; Eerdmans, 2012); Trent C. Butler, Judges (Word Biblical Commentary 8; Nelson, 2009); Jack M. Sasson, Judges 1-12 (Anchor Yale Bible 6D; Yale University Press, 2014); Yairah Amit, The Book of Judges: The Art of Editing (Brill, 1999)
- minorityDespoiled or ravished, with the scene written as a reversal in which Jael becomes the aggressor and the language of defeat doubles as the language of sexual violence.; Susan Niditch, "Eroticism and Death in the Tale of Jael," in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. Peggy L. Day (Fortress, 1989), 43-57; Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (Oxford University Press, 1993), 113-17
- minorityThe scene should be read through motherhood or through the breach of hospitality rather than through sex, so the word keeps its plain sense of violent ruin.; Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (University of Chicago Press, 1988); Victor H. Matthews, Judges and Ruth (New Cambridge Bible Commentary; Cambridge University Press, 2004)