Below are some verses which state clearly that the Promised Land became a wilderness, or desert. If anyone finds other CLEAR examples of the Promised Land being called a wilderness, especially in a spiritual sense, let me know. I am aware that there are some iffy ones.
The Hebrew translators and I have not reviewed together the verses from Jeremiah , but I think the translation is OK. If you Hebrew folk want to double check them, please do. They are relatively easy verses.
jdc
Jeremiah 12:10. Many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard; they have trampled down my heritage; they have turned my precious heritage into a desolate wilderness.
11. They have made it a desolation; it mourns for me, devastated. The whole land has been made desolate because there is not a man who lays it to heart.
Jeremiah 22:6. For thus says Jehovah concerning the house of the king of Judah: “You are Gilead to me, the height of Lebanon; yet, I will damn myself if I do not make you a desert of uninhabited cities.”
Ezekiel 20:34. And I will bring you out from the nations and gather you out of the countries where you have been scattered, with a strong hand and outstretched arm and poured-out wrath!
35. And I will bring you to the wilderness of the nations, and there will I enter into judgment with you, face to face.
Hosea 2:2. Plead! Plead with your mother (because she is not my wife, and I am not her husband), that she put away her prostitution from before her and her adulteries from between her breasts.
3. Otherwise, I will strip her naked and expose her as in the day of her birth. And I will make her like the wilderness, and lay her waste like a desert, and I will kill her with thirst.
