Hebrew word · H7736
שׁוּד
yashud
to waste
'He/it devastates, lays waste.' BDB and HALOT treat it as a by-form of šāḏaḏ, 'to ruin, plunder, despoil,' a verb used for raiders and invading armies stripping a land (Isa 15:1; Jer 4:20).
Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
(Qal) to ruin, destroy, spoil, devastate
A grammatical form of sha.dad (שָׁדַד "to ruin" H7703)
Abridged from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).
In depth
- Range of meaning
'He/it devastates, lays waste.' BDB and HALOT treat it as a by-form of šāḏaḏ, 'to ruin, plunder, despoil,' a verb used for raiders and invading armies stripping a land (Isa 15:1; Jer 4:20).
- Against the English
KJV/WEB 'wasteth' keeps the old sense of 'lay waste' (ruin a land), not 'squander.' BSB 'destroys' and NASB 'devastates' are clear and modern.
- How it drifted
Modern readers may hear KJV's 'wasteth' as 'wastes away' or 'squanders.' The sense is violent ruin.
- Used elsewhere in the period
This spelling occurs only here. The Septuagint did not read it as a verb at all: it read the consonants as wešēd, 'and a demon' (šēḏ is the word for foreign demons or spirits in Deut 32:17 and Ps 106:37). That produced its 'noonday demon' (daimonion mesēmbrinon). The Hebrew vowel tradition, the Masoretic text, has a verb.
Where it appears
Psalms · 1
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Psalm 91:6 יָשׁ֥וּד [which] it will devastate
nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the calamity that destroys at noon.
Here: Most lexicons take this as a rare by-form of šāḏaḏ, 'to ruin, plunder,' a word used for raiders stripping a land. This spelling appears only here. Its sound is close to šēḏ, 'demon,' and the Greek translators read it that way.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.