Adamah: a walled town in the northern territory of Naphtali, called by the ordinary Hebrew word for tilled soil
Adamah appears once in the Bible, in the roll of fortified towns that Joshua assigns to the tribe of Naphtali in the far north of the country. It is listed in one breath, with Chinnereth just before it and Ramah and Hazor just after it, inside a run of nineteen towns and their outlying villages. Nothing else is said about it anywhere: no story, no inhabitant, no later mention.
The name is simply the everyday Hebrew word for workable ground (אֲדָמָה) used as a place name, so it means something close to "Farmland" or "Red Earth." Towns in that country were regularly named for what the land there was like, and a name of this kind advertises good dirt. A Hebrew speaker heard that meaning immediately, which is the one thing the English spelling hides.
Where the town stood is still unknown. Its slot in the list, after the towns along the Sea of Galilee and before the great northern strongholds, points to the eastern side of Lower Galilee, and several sites in that area have been proposed over the years. None has won agreement, so Adamah remains a name on a boundary list rather than a place on a map.
Several other biblical names look or sound almost the same, and none of them is this town:
- Admah (אַדְמָה) was one of the towns wiped out alongside Sodom, far to the south.
- Adami (אֲדָמִי) sat on Naphtali's own border and is named three verses earlier in the same description.
- Adam (אָדָם) was a town beside the Jordan where the river piled up at Israel's crossing, and it is also the first man's name.