sudden, sweeping ruin: catastrophe that overwhelms a person or a place without warning, and the emptied waste it leaves behind.
This is a word for catastrophe on the largest scale, and the Bible attaches two ideas to it almost every time. The ruin is total, carrying off whatever it reaches. And it arrives unannounced.
That second idea is written right into the verses:
- ruin overtakes a man who never sees it coming, and he falls into it himself (Psalm 35:8)
- ruin lands on Babylon suddenly, and she has no way to ward it off (Isaiah 47:11)
- ruin travels in from far away on the day God settles accounts (Isaiah 10:3)
Because the ruin is pictured as arriving rather than simply sitting there, the word slides easily into weather. An invading army sweeps in like a storm, roaring as it comes, blotting out the land like a cloud. Two other verses look at the far end of the same event instead and name the stripped, empty ground a disaster leaves behind. There the writers set the word beside a rhyming partner meaning "desolation" (מְשׁוֹאָה), used purely for the echo, roughly the way English pairs "waste and wasteland."
One word covers all of that because the writers are not interested in cataloguing kinds of trouble. They are naming the moment when everything gives way at once, whether the thing that gives way is a person, a city, a nation, or a stretch of farmland.