elon

Esau's marriages to local women are reported twice, and both times one of his wives is the daughter of a Canaanite named Elon. Genesis 26 calls her Basemath, Genesis 36 calls her Adah, and readers have long noticed the difference between the two lists. What does not change is the father's name and the note that he was a Hittite.

Elon is an ordinary name in the region, and that is part of the reason scholars hold that the people Genesis calls Hittites here are a local Canaanite group rather than the Hittite empire far to the north. The name means something like "Oak" or "Great Tree", the same kind of name as Tamar for the date palm, and it is spelled exactly like the Hebrew word for a great landmark tree (אֵלוֹן).

He appears only in lists. Genesis names the sons of Zebulun who went down to Egypt, Sered and Elon and Jahleel, and the later census turns those same three names into the three clans of the tribe, so that Elon stands at the head of the family called the Elonites (אֵלֹנִי).

Nothing at all is told about the man himself. In records like these the name of an ancestor and the name of his clan are one and the same word, and it was the clan that mattered to Israel's bookkeeping, since a clan's name fixed its place in the tribe and its claim to land.

He belongs to the short notices that the book of Judges sets between its long stories. There is a name, a tribe, a term of office, a burial place, and nothing more: Elon led Israel for ten years, then died and was buried in Aijalon in the territory of Zebulun (אַיָּלוֹן).

The burial notice contains a quiet play on words that English cannot show. Written without vowel marks, the leader's name and the name of the town look the same, and one ancient Greek manuscript tradition writes both as a single word, so that Elon is buried in Elon. Because of that, some scholars read these brief notices about Israel's lesser judges as memories of clans and the places they held rather than as accounts of individual men, while others take the burial site as an ordinary local tradition about a real person.

The word names a place once, in the list of towns given to Dan, where it stands between Aijalon and Timnah. Nothing else in the Bible describes it, and its site has never been identified with confidence.

The list is easy to misread, because the town named just before it is written with the same letters (אַיָּלוֹן), and only the vowel marks added by later scribes keep the two apart. A place called Elon-beth-hanan (אֵילוֹן בֵּית חָנָן) turns up later as a station in one of Solomon's administrative districts, and commentators generally take it to be this same Danite town under a longer name.