shayit

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• Both name the wild thorns that overrun a neglected vineyard or field, the mark of fertile land left to go back to waste.Isa 5:6Isa 7:23
• Both serve as fuel that fire consumes in Isaiah's pictures of judgment sweeping through the land.Isa 9:18Isa 27:4

• Beyond thorns, שָׁמִיר also names a hard cutting stone, an adamant or diamond point harder than flint, used to engrave or to picture a stubborn heart. שַׁיִת never carries this stone sense.Jer 17:1Ezk 3:9Zec 7:12
• שָׁמִיר can stand on its own as a thorn word, growing over ruined ground without its partner, whereas שַׁיִת appears only bound alongside שָׁמִיר.Isa 32:13

• All seven of its appearances are in Isaiah, and in every one of them it stands next to the same partner word, the one English Bibles usually print as "briers." It is half of a set phrase rather than a word a writer picks up freely.Isa 5:6Isa 7:23Isa 9:18Isa 27:4
• It measures ruin by the acre. What goes to thorns here is never one field corner but a vineyard the owner stops pruning, a vineyard of a thousand vines worth a thousand pieces of silver, and whole hillsides that used to be worked with a hoe.Isa 5:6Isa 7:23Isa 7:25
• Because whole districts have gone over to it, the land changes hands: people enter it with bow and arrows as if it were open country, and cattle and sheep are turned loose where crops used to grow.Isa 7:24Isa 7:25

• Both name the prickly growth that moves in once people stop working the ground, so that the plant itself becomes the evidence that a field, a vineyard, or a whole country has been abandoned.Gen 3:18Isa 32:13Jer 12:13Isa 5:6Isa 7:23
• Both burn. Their dry stems are the standard image of fuel that flares up fast, and in the prophets the fire that runs through them is God's.Psa 118:12Isa 33:12Isa 9:18Isa 10:17
• In both, the thorns slide from plants to people. What the fire or the sword finally goes out against is a hostile nation or a set of enemies, described as growth to be cleared rather than as an army.2Sa 23:6Ezk 28:24Isa 27:4

• This is the ordinary, everyday Hebrew word for a thorn, and it turns up right across the Bible: in the curse on the ground at the beginning of Genesis, in a farming law, in a song about a king, and in the prophets. It is not tied to one writer or one kind of writing.Gen 3:18Exo 22:62Sa 23:6Hos 10:8
• It names thorns that people actually deal with, not only scenery: the dry brush a runaway fire catches in before it destroys a neighbor's grain, and the desert thorns Gideon gathers to punish the men of Succoth with.Exo 22:6Jdg 8:7Jdg 8:16
• It carries a whole picture on its own, with no partner plant beside it. In half its verses it is the only prickly thing named, and the sentence still works.Psa 118:12Jer 4:3Jer 12:13Isa 33:12

• Every appearance is in Isaiah, and always about land people once tended: a vineyard whose care is withdrawn, hillsides that used to be worked with a hoe.Isa 5:6Isa 7:23Isa 7:25
• It is repeatedly fuel. God's judgment is pictured as fire running through it and finishing it off, in one case in a single day.Isa 9:18Isa 10:17Isa 27:4
• Where it grows, the countryside has passed from farming to open range and hunting ground: cattle and sheep wander there and people come carrying bows.Isa 7:24Isa 7:25
• Its own fixed partner is a different word, שָׁמִיר "briers", and that stock phrase belongs to Isaiah's picture of a whole territory gone wild, not to one field.Isa 5:6Isa 9:18

• Both name low prickly growth nobody plants and nobody wants, and both are named to say something about the ground rather than about the plant: where it comes up, the land has stopped yielding anything people can use.Gen 3:18Isa 7:23
• Neither word ever stands alone. Each is locked into a pair with a second thorn word, so in both cases the reader is shown a tangle of worthless growth rather than one identifiable species.Gen 3:18Isa 9:18
• Both turn up where an ordered, cared-for place has been handed over to weeds as a sign of judgment, whether that place is an altar site or a planted vineyard.Hos 10:8Isa 5:6

• This is the word for what the ground itself throws up against human work: the crop a farmer gets in place of food once the soil is under a curse.Gen 3:18
• Its one other appearance puts the plant on top of altars, so it pictures a place of worship abandoned and taken over by scrub.Hos 10:8
• Both times it stands beside the same partner word, קוֹץ "thorns", making a fixed two-word phrase for useless prickly growth rather than a plant named on its own.Gen 3:18Hos 10:8

• It never stands on its own. In every one of its verses it is bolted to a second brier word, so it works as half of a fixed phrase usually rendered "briers and thorns" rather than as a plant anyone names by itself.Isa 5:6Isa 7:23Isa 9:18Isa 27:4
• Every use belongs to Isaiah and to one subject: good farmland that God stops tending. The vineyard is left unpruned and the scrub comes up, ground once worth a thousand pieces of silver goes over to it, and hills that used to be hoed are handed to grazing animals.Isa 5:6Isa 7:23Isa 7:25
• It is repeatedly what fire eats. Wickedness burns like it, God's own light and holiness burn it off in a single day, and he dares it to line up against him so he can set it alight.Isa 9:18Isa 10:17Isa 27:4

• Both name useless prickly growth that comes up where a crop or a vineyard should be, so the sight of it says the ground has been given up on.Job 31:40Isa 5:6
• Both stand for whole places emptied of people and taken back by the wild, with thorns growing where families used to live and where strongholds used to stand.Isa 34:13Hos 9:6Isa 7:24

• This is a single spike you can touch, grab, or be pierced by, not just scrub in a field. One works its way into a drunk man's hand, one is imagined running through a sea monster's jaw, and one is the hook by which soldiers lead a captured king away.Pro 26:9Job 41:22Ch 33:11
• It carries a picture of something low and worthless set beside something grand. A king's fable has the thistle of Lebanon ask the cedar for its daughter and then get trampled by a passing animal, and a love song sets one lily in the middle of thorns.2Ki 14:92Ch 25:18Sng 2:2
• It can name a place rather than a threat: terrified Israelites hide in the thorn thickets the way they hide in caves, rocks, and pits.1Sa 13:6
• It ranges across the whole Hebrew Bible and across every kind of writing: history, a fable between kings, a love poem, a wisdom saying, and a prophet's picture of a ruined city.1Sa 13:6Sng 2:2Pro 26:9Isa 34:13

• Never stands on its own. Every time it occurs it is the second half of one fixed phrase, which English Bibles usually print as "briers and thorns," and the phrase rather than the plant is what carries the sense.Isa 5:6Isa 7:23Isa 7:25
• Always describes worked farmland handed back to the wild: a vineyard nobody prunes or hoes any more, fields where a thousand vines once stood, hillsides once broken up with a hoe and now left to cattle and sheep.Isa 5:6Isa 7:23Isa 7:25
• Doubles as dry fuel in Isaiah's pictures of fire, the scrub that catches fast and that God's judgment burns off the ground in a single day.Isa 9:18Isa 10:17Isa 27:4

• Both belong to Isaiah alone, and both picture prickly growth on ground nobody is tending. In the same chapter, one names the bushes that swarms settle on after the invasion and the other says the whole country will turn to thorns.Isa 7:19Isa 7:24
• Neither one can be pinned to an identifiable plant, and English Bibles reach for the same two words, "thorns" and "briers," for both, so a translation gives the reader no way to tell which Hebrew word is on the page.Isa 55:13Isa 5:6

• Names a real bush standing out in open country. It is listed alongside steep ravines and the clefts of rocks as one of the places where swarms of insects come and settle, so it marks a physical spot on the landscape rather than a condition of the land.Isa 7:19
• Appears in a promise of reversal, where the thornbush is what gets cleared away and something better grows in its place: a cypress comes up where this bush stood. It can mark the END of the wasteland, not only its arrival.Isa 55:13
• Is not tied to one fixed phrase. It stands beside a different prickly plant in one verse and appears without any partner in the other, so it behaves like an ordinary word for a thorny shrub.Isa 7:19Isa 55:13