goings out: the point at which a line, a place, or a thing runs out, ends, or issues forth
This word comes from the ordinary verb "to go out," and it names the place or point where that going out happens. Almost always plural, it works like a snapshot of movement frozen at its edge: where a boundary line finally runs out, where a city opens onto the road, where water breaks from a spring, where a trapped person finds a way through.
Most of its appearances are in the survey-like border descriptions of Numbers and Joshua. There it marks the far end of a boundary line, the spot where the border "goes out" and stops. It is close to the plain word for a border (גְּבוּל), but it is not the same idea: the border is the whole line or the land it encloses, while this word pins down the terminal points where that line runs out.
A handful of poetic uses stretch the same picture in fresh directions:
- In Proverbs the heart is the place "from which" life goes out, so the word names life's wellsprings.
- In one psalm the ways out from death belong to God, so it names escape or rescue.
- In Ezekiel it marks a city's exits, the gates where people pass out.
A related word from the same verb, מוֹצָא, sits nearby and can also mean a spring or an exit, but it usually points to a single source or a single act of going out, while this word gathers up the several end points or outlets.