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Bible Dictionaries
Desert
Smith's Bible Dictionary
or Desert. Not a stretch of sand, an utterly barren waste, but a wild, uninhabited region. The words rendered, in the Authorized Version, by "desert," when used in the historical books denote definite localities.
1. Arabah. This word means that very depressed and enclosed region - the deepest and the hottest chasm in the world - the sunken valley north and south of the Dead Sea, but more particularly the former. See Arabah. Arabah, in the sense of the Jordan valley, is translated by the word "desert" only in Ezekiel 47:8.
2. Midbar. This word, which our translators have most frequently rendered by "desert," is accurately "the pasture ground". It is most frequently used for those tracts of waste land which lie beyond the cultivated ground in the immediate neighborhood of the towns and villages of Palestine, and which are a very familiar feature to the traveller in that country. Exodus 3:1; Exodus 6:3; Exodus 19:2.
3. Charbah appears to have the force of dryness, and thence of desolation. It is rendered "desert" in Psalms 102:6; Isaiah 48:21; Ezekiel 13:4. The term commonly employed for it, in the Authorized Version, is "waste places" or "desolation".
4. Jeshimon, with the definite article, apparently denotes the waste tracts on both sides of the Dead Sea. In all these cases, it is treated as a proper name, in the Authorized Version. Without the article, it occurs in a few passages of poetry in the following of which it is rendered; "desert:" Psalms 78:40; Psalms 106:14; Isaiah 43:19-20.
These files are public domain.
Smith, William, Dr. Entry for 'Desert'. Smith's Bible Dictionary. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/sbd/d/desert.html. 1901.
