Reference: Wilderness, Desert
Hastings
These terms stand for several Heb. and Gr. words, with different shades of meaning.
1. midb
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The earth was without form and an empty waste, and darkness was upon the face of the very great deep. The Spirit of God was moving (hovering, brooding) over the face of the waters.
He found him in a desert land, in the howling void of the wilderness; He kept circling around him, He scanned him [penetratingly], He kept him as the pupil of His eye.
In the wilderness: Beth-arabah, Middin, Secacah, Nibshan, the City of Salt, and En-gedi; six cities with their villages.
The caravans which travel by way of them turn aside; they go into the waste places and perish. [Such is my disappointment in you, the friends I fully trusted.]
Behold, as wild asses in the desert, [the poor] go forth to their work, seeking diligently for prey and food; the wilderness yields them bread for their children [in roots and herbage].
They are gaunt with want and famine; they gnaw the dry and barren ground or flee into the wilderness, into the gloom of wasteness and desolation.
Yet they still went on to sin against Him by provoking and rebelling against the Most High in the wilderness (in the land of drought).
I am like a melancholy pelican or vulture of the wilderness; I am like a [desolate] owl of the waste places.
Let the wilderness and its cities lift up their voices, the villages that Kedar inhabits. Let the inhabitants of the rock [Sela or Petra] sing; let them shout from the tops of the mountains!
And they thirsted not when He led them through the deserts; He caused the waters to flow out of the rock for them; He split the rock also, and the waters gushed out.
Or [you have the untamed and reckless nature of] a wild donkey used to the desert, in her heat sniffing the wind [for the scent of a male]. In her mating season who can restrain her? No males seeking her need weary themselves; in her month they will find her [seeking them].
Even the jackals draw out the breast, they give suck to their young ones, but the daughter of my people has become cruel like ostriches in the wilderness [that desert their young].
But [in comparison with the degree of love I have for Jacob] I have hated Esau [Edom] and have laid waste his mountains, and his heritage I have given to the jackals of the wilderness.