This does not appear to be a proper sentence in English. As a native speaker, it sounds nonsensical.

@anjin. I agree and changed it. Because it was part of the Tanaka Corpus, I hesitated to change it earlier.

I wonder if this change retained the original meaning,

I suspect that it may have been supposed to mean that the rain cleared the dust from the air, and "laid" it on the ground.

> The rain washed away the dust.

The Esperanto and Russian match.

@CK
@small_snow
@Pfirsichbaeumchen

Could someone please either come up with a different English translation for the Japanese, or change the Japanese, and link/relink as necessary, keeping the "Tanaka Corpus" tags in place?

To retain the Tanaka Corpus tag, perhaps, the English should be reverted to the original, and translations added after the 2023 edit should be unlinked.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lay
See definition 4.

"The rain laid the dust" without anything more sounds odd to me. Maybe "The rain laid the dust down" or "The rain settled the dust"?

Google books: rain "laid the dust"

https://www.google.com/search?q...=gws-wiz-books

At first, I thought it was just old-fashioned language, but it does appear in some fairly recent books, too.