gevulah

BDB (148), HALOT and DCH II all treat גְּבוּלָה as a distinct feminine noun of the root גבל I with the range "boundary, border, territory," and note that it is almost exclusively plural; Ottosson (TDOT 2:361-366) handles it inside the article on the masculine גְּבוּל and takes the two as functionally equivalent, which is why some treatments simply fold the feminine into the masculine entry. The ten occurrences fall into two literary environments. The first is the priestly and Deuteronomistic boundary description (Numbers 32:33; 34:2, 12; Joshua 18:20; 19:49), which Levine reads as a territorial charter reflecting the Late Bronze Egyptian province of Canaan rather than a historical Israelite frontier. The second is the cosmic and political texts in which God is the subject of הִצִּיב: Hossfeld and Zenger observe that Psalm 74:17 (אַתָּה הִצַּבְתָּ כָּל־גְּבוּלוֹת אָרֶץ) deliberately echoes Deuteronomy 32:8 (יַצֵּב גְּבֻלֹת עַמִּים), fusing the containment of the sea and the allotment of the nations into one creational act, and Isaiah 10:13 then places the identical phrase גְּבוּלֹת עַמִּים in the mouth of the Assyrian king as a usurpation of it. Deuteronomy 32:8 carries a celebrated text-critical crux (4QDeutj and Papyrus Fouad 266 supporting "sons of God" against MT "sons of Israel"; Skehan, Tov, Sanders, Heiser, Tigay), but the variant concerns the measure of the allotment rather than the sense of גְּבֻלֹת itself. Clines (on Job 24:2) argues that the plural there signals systemic dispossession, and that Job's protest gains force precisely because Deuteronomy 27:17 curses this act while the perpetrators go unpunished. The most disputed occurrence lexically is Isaiah 28:25, where גְּבֻלָתוֹ is taken either as the field's border, along which the spelt is sown, or as the plot assigned to that grain; the surrounding agricultural vocabulary is itself obscure and the clause has attracted emendation. The Septuagint equivalent, as with the masculine noun, is ὅριον.