Besom

Besom is an archaic English word for a broom or sweeping instrument, used once in the Authorized Version of Isaiah 14:23 to translate the Hebrew word meaning sweeper. The passage belongs to Isaiah's taunt song against Babylon, in which God declares that he will make Babylon a possession of the bittern and pools of water and sweep it with the besom of destruction. The image conveys total and irreversible obliteration—as a broom sweeps a floor bare.

The metaphor draws on the mundane domestic act of sweeping to describe cosmic-scale divine judgment, a rhetorical device characteristic of the prophets who ground the most solemn pronouncements in everyday imagery. The word's rarity in biblical usage—it appears only this once—makes it one of the more archaic and distinctive terms in the King James translation. Modern versions typically render it simply as the broom of destruction, preserving the sweep metaphor without the unfamiliar vocabulary.