Description
The square was an open place in a town or city, often formed by the intersection of two or more streets (see Street, road, path, way, track). Like the streets, the square was usually unpaved, only sometimes paved with stones. The square was open to the sky and often served as a gathering place for the inhabitants of the city. One of the squares of a town usually served as a marketplace, a central location for bartering, buying, and selling.
Translation
Many cultures, where people live in permanent settlements, will know an open place in the middle of a settlement used for public gatherings.
In biblical times one such open area, which was often the most important one in the city, stood inside the city wall, near the gates. In this place, town administration meetings (DEU 21:19), legal transactions (RUT 4:1, RUT 4:11), and markets (2KI 7:1, 2KI 7:18) were held (see City gate). It will sometimes be possible in translation to indicate the place by the activity that is taking place there rather than by a word that corresponds to “square.” A good example of this is the way GNT renders JOB 29:7. The Hebrew reads literally “When I went out to the gate of the city, when I prepared my seat in the square” (RSV); GNT says “Whenever the city elders met and I took my place among them.” Compare also GNT at PRO 7:12: “or stood waiting at a corner, sometimes in the streets, sometimes in the marketplace.”
While most translations and commentaries understand the Hebrew word rchov to mean “city square,” some understand it in the more general sense of “street” in some passages (and this indeed has become its only meaning in modern Hebrew); for example, KJV renders it “street[s]” in all but three instances, and NIV, while usually rendering rchov as “square[s],” has “streets” in about one-third of its appearances. By way of example, most translations render rchovoth in DAN 9:25 as “streets”; some common-language translations (GECL, FRCL, ITCL) avoid a direct translation of rchovoth by speaking of “Jerusalem” being reconstructed.