Properly, drought , i.e. (by implication) a desolation
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The Hebrew noun ḥorĕbāh names a ruin, ruined place, wasteland, or state of physical desolation. In prophetic and covenant settings it often describes cities, sanctuaries, or lands brought low through announced judgment.
Reader summary
Full entry for חׇרְבָּה (H2723) · Open the biblical lexicon
The Hebrew noun ḥorĕbāh names a ruin, ruined place, wasteland, or state of physical desolation. In prophetic and covenant settings it often describes cities, sanctuaries, or lands brought low through announced judgment.
The BSB source-word alignment has 42 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include ruins (7), a ruin (2), among the ruins (2), and the ruins (2), in ruins (2).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Leviticus 26:31. Its strongest book concentrations include Ezekiel (14), Jeremiah (10), Isaiah (9), Psalms (3).
The Hebrew noun ḥorĕbāh names a ruin, ruined place, wasteland, or state of physical desolation. In prophetic and covenant settings it often describes cities, sanctuaries, or lands brought low through announced judgment. Elsewhere it can name old ruins as the visible remains of human achievement, loss, or long neglect. Isaiah gives the noun a further pastoral force by placing ruins within promises of comfort, rebuilding, and restored habitation.
The word therefore points to damaged places and the social worlds bound up with them; it does not itself explain every cause of collapse. A passage must identify whether war, covenant infidelity, imperial violence, time, or another circumstance is in view. Nor does the noun guarantee that every ruin will be rebuilt on a reader's timetable. Faithful teaching may lament devastation, confess named sin, protect survivors, and hope in God's restoring mercy while refusing to assign secret guilt to communities living among damaged homes, institutions, or landscapes.
Ḥorĕbāh moves from rubble and ruined cities to prophetic promises that damaged places will again be inhabited. Its force comes from the passage's account of loss, responsibility, lament, and restoration rather than from a single symbolic formula.
I will reduce your cities to rubble and lay waste your sanctuaries, and I will refuse to smell the pleasing aroma of your sacrifices.
Within the covenant warnings, ruined cities and sanctuaries are an announced consequence of persistent rebellion, not a general explanation for every later disaster.
With kings and counselors of the earth, who built for themselves cities now in ruins,
Job's lament remembers royal builders and their ruined cities while longing for rest, exposing the mortality of even monumental human work.
For the Lord will comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all her ruins; He will make her wilderness like Eden and her desert like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and melodious song.
Zion's ruins become the setting for divine compassion and garden-like renewal, so devastation is neither denied nor granted the final word.
Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins; you will restore the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of the Breach, Restorer of the Streets of Dwelling.
The promised community is known by repairing long-broken foundations and restoring streets for dwelling within Isaiah's call to just and merciful faithfulness.
They will rebuild the ancient ruins; they will restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities, the desolations of many generations.
Those comforted by good news participate in renewing cities damaged across generations, joining restoration of people with restoration of shared places.
In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the sacred books, according to the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years.
Daniel reads Jeremiah's stated period for Jerusalem's ruins and responds with confession and prayer rather than turning the number into a free-standing timetable for other crises.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Hebrew word. Desolation as covenant judgment: the land's sterility signals God's withdrawal of blessing and covenant faithfulness.
Desolation as covenant judgment: the land's sterility signals God's withdrawal of blessing and covenant faithfulness.
properly, drought, i.e. (by implication) a desolation BDB: waste Usage: decayed place, desolate (place, -tion), destruction, (laid) waste (place).
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
חׇרְבָּה is built from this root:
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
Ḥorĕbāh gives Scripture concrete language for what remains after cities, sanctuaries, and settled life have been damaged. Leviticus uses rubble within a covenant warning, while Job places impressive construction among the works that death and time can overtake. Isaiah does not speak of repair by minimizing harm. Zion's ruins are seen, pitied, and transformed; ancient foundations and streets become sites of communal work, justice, and renewed dwelling.
Daniel likewise faces Jerusalem's desolation by reading the prophetic word and praying confession, not by claiming mastery over history. These witnesses teach readers to resist two errors. Ruins should not be romanticized as picturesque stages for someone else's lesson, and they should not be treated as proof that affected people bear unusual guilt. Pastoral use begins with truthful lament, concrete protection, and careful attention to the text's named causes.
Hope in restoration can then sustain costly, patient repair without demanding quick emotional closure or promising that every loss will be reversed in the same way before the final renewal of all things.
Isa.51.3
Ḥorĕbāh is a feminine Hebrew noun appearing in singular and plural forms. Older glossing connects the term with dryness or drought, while the governed direct BSB witnesses render H2723 with ruin, ruins, rubble, wasteland, desert, and desolation according to the surrounding construction. The noun usually names a damaged place or ruined condition; verbs and context identify who caused it and what may happen next.
The Old Testament's movement from ruined places to promised restoration contributes to the wider biblical hope that God does not abandon His purposes amid human collapse. The New Testament announces reconciliation, a gathered people, resurrection, and the final renewal of creation, but it does not make H2723 a direct lexical key to every church-building project or social program.
Connections should therefore move through the canonical themes of judgment, mercy, faithful repair, resurrection, and new creation while preserving the historical claims of each passage.