χάραξ

From the study of Luke 19:43

Range of meaning

(1) A pointed stake, especially a vine-prop or a stake for a palisade. (2) A palisade: a fence of such stakes, usually set on an earthen bank, as around a Roman army camp. (3) In siege settings, the earthwork-and-stake barrier an attacking army builds around a city (circumvallation) or the siege-mound it raises against the walls.

Against the English

KJV 'trench' (from Tyndale) now makes people picture a ditch dug into the ground. YLT's 'rampart' and BSB/WEB/ESV's 'barricade' are closer. NIV's 'embankment' and NLT's 'ramparts' stress the earth mound. The Greek word focuses on the stakes, but in practice a palisade and its bank went together.

How it drifted

In early modern English 'trench' could mean a field fortification as a whole: the ditch together with the bank of earth thrown up from it. After the trench warfare of World War I, the word means only the ditch for most readers.

Used elsewhere in the period

Polybius and other historians use it often for the palisade of a Roman camp. In the Greek Old Testament it is a standard siege word: in Isa 29:3, God says against Jerusalem ('Ariel'), 'I will cast a charax around you and set towers around you'. Ezek 4:2 has the prophet act out the siege of Jerusalem with a charax set around a model city. In the Greek of Isa 37:33 (as best I can tell) the word appears in the promise that the Assyrian would not besiege Jerusalem. Josephus (Jewish War 5.491–511) tells how Titus, after his siege-banks were burned, ringed the whole city with a wall to starve it out.