Devastation ; figuratively, astonishment
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The Hebrew noun šĕmāmāh describes desolation, devastation, or the condition of a land or city left waste. Prophets use it for fields consumed, settlements emptied, proud powers overthrown, and covenant communities facing the consequences named in their messages.
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Full entry for שְׁמָמָה (H8077) · Open the biblical lexicon
The Hebrew noun šĕmāmāh describes desolation, devastation, or the condition of a land or city left waste. Prophets use it for fields consumed, settlements emptied, proud powers overthrown, and covenant communities facing the consequences named in their messages.
The BSB source-word alignment has 57 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include desolate (16), a desolation (13), a desolate (6), desolation (3), wasteland (3).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Exodus 23:29. Its strongest book concentrations include Ezekiel (22), Jeremiah (15), Isaiah (6), Joel (4).
The Hebrew noun šĕmāmāh describes desolation, devastation, or the condition of a land or city left waste. Prophets use it for fields consumed, settlements emptied, proud powers overthrown, and covenant communities facing the consequences named in their messages. The word can also express the stunned or despairing human response that devastation produces. Exodus 23 shows that desolation is not merely a punishment label: the land could become empty if its transition happened too quickly.
Isaiah and Ezekiel then show that a place called Desolate need not remain under that name; delight, cultivation, and renewed habitation can follow by God's mercy. The noun does not authorize readers to diagnose every abandoned place, war zone, ecological crisis, or personal collapse as a direct divine sentence. It gives serious language for conditions in which life, fruitfulness, safety, and community have been stripped away.
Responsible teaching listens to the passage's stated cause, honors those who suffer the devastation, and distinguishes promised restoration from wishful certainty.
Šĕmāmāh names the condition and impact of devastation: emptied land, ruined community life, or the shock such loss brings. Its witnesses range from prudent prevention to prophetic judgment and from communal lament to a promised reversal of the name Desolate.
I will not drive them out before you in a single year; otherwise the land would become desolate and wild animals would multiply against you.
The gradual transition protects the land from becoming empty and overrun, showing that desolation can describe a practical consequence that wise pacing prevents.
Your land is desolate; your cities are burned with fire. Foreigners devour your fields before you—a desolation demolished by strangers.
Isaiah makes devastation visible through burned cities, consumed fields, and foreign invasion within his covenant accusation against Judah.
No longer will you be called Forsaken, nor your land named Desolate; but you will be called Hephzibah, and your land Beulah; for the Lord will take delight in you, and your land will be His bride.
The prophetic renaming reverses Zion's public identity from forsaken and desolate to delighted in and joined, grounding hope in the Lord's covenant favor.
Many shepherds have destroyed My vineyard; they have trampled My plot of ground. They have turned My pleasant field into a desolate wasteland.
Jeremiah identifies destructive shepherds as agents who trample God's pleasant field, making leadership failure part of the devastation the image exposes.
They have made it a desolation; desolate before Me, it mourns. All the land is laid waste, but no man takes it to heart.
The desolate land is portrayed as mourning while people fail to take its condition to heart, joining ecological and communal loss with moral indifference.
The desolate land will be cultivated instead of lying desolate in the sight of all who pass through.
Ezekiel contrasts public desolation with renewed cultivation as part of a larger promise that vindicates God's holy name and restores His people.
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 that stuns: physical ruin so complete it evokes speechless shock and bewilderment.
Desolation that stuns: physical ruin so complete it evokes speechless shock and bewilderment.
devastation; figuratively, astonishment BDB: a devastation Usage: (laid, × most) desolate(-ion), waste.
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 4 selected witnesses from 58 lexical occurrence verses.
שְׁמָמָה 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.
Šĕmāmāh helps teachers speak about devastation as a condition that affects land, livelihood, public identity, and the capacity for ordinary life. Exodus 23 makes an important distinction: an empty land can result from a transition carried out too quickly, so the noun is not an automatic verdict on victims. Isaiah 1 and Jeremiah 12 do place devastation inside prophetic accusation, yet those passages name rebellion, invasion, and destructive shepherds rather than asking readers to guess.
Jeremiah's land mourns while no one takes the loss to heart, exposing indifference as part of the moral crisis. Isaiah 62 and Ezekiel 36 answer desolation with covenant delight, cultivation, and public renewal. The movement is not denial. God sees what has been stripped away and promises a future no longer defined by abandonment. Pastoral teaching should therefore tell the truth about agents of harm, resist blaming displaced or traumatized people, and make room for sustained grief.
Hope becomes credible when it accompanies protection, accountability, patient rebuilding, and trust in God's purposes without forcing quick recovery or claiming that every devastated place carries the same promise in the same form.
Isa.62.4
Šĕmāmāh is a feminine Hebrew noun, though Jeremiah 12:11 includes a closely shaped adjectival form under the same Strong's tagging. BSB uses desolation, desolate, wasteland, laid waste, and in Ezekiel 7:27 despair. The surrounding clause determines whether the emphasis falls on an emptied condition, devastation's effect, or the stunned response it evokes.
Old Testament desolation texts furnish much of the Bible's language for cities emptied by judgment, failed leadership, invasion, and loss, as well as for land restored by God's mercy. New Testament warnings and apocalyptic scenes draw on that inherited world of imagery, while the gospel gathers a people whose hope rests in Christ's resurrection and the promised renewal of creation.
H8077 itself does not prove that every New Testament desolation image has the same referent or that the church inherits each land promise without distinction. The canonical connection lies in God's truthful judgment, care for a devastated people, defeat of destructive powers, and final purpose to dwell with His people in renewed creation.