gilad

Gilead is the block of hill country on the far side of the Jordan, rising out of the river valley into oak and pine forest and some of the best grazing land Israel ever held, with Bashan (בָּשָׁן) beyond it to the north. The Jabbok stream cuts it roughly in half, which is why the Bible keeps speaking of half of Gilead going to one group and half to another. Israel took it before ever crossing into Canaan, and Moses handed it to Reuben, Gad and half of Manasseh, so it became the first Israelite territory and the one furthest from the center of national life.

One name then has to do a great deal of work, and the sentence around it tells you which job it is doing:

• the region as a whole, with its borders, its cities and its pasture
• the ridge itself, spoken of as the hill country of Gilead
• the people of the region acting as one body, with elders who bargain and fighting men who hold the river crossings
• the second half of a town's name, as in Ramoth in Gilead and Jabesh-gilead, where it says which country the town belongs to
• a man's name, carried by the ancestor of the clans who settled there and by at least two others

A person from the region gets a word of their own, a Gileadite (גִּלְעָדִי). Because the land lay across the river, Gilead was always the exposed edge. Ammon camped in it, Aram threshed it, Assyria carried it off first, and people in trouble ran to it: Jacob getting clear of Laban, the elders bargaining back the son they had driven out, David crossing over when Absalom took Jerusalem. Ramoth in Gilead, the walled town on that frontier, was fought over so often that Ahab died trying to take it back and Jehu was anointed king there in the middle of the next campaign.

The region's other claim to fame was its resin. Caravans carried balm out of Gilead, and the trade was known well enough that Jeremiah could ask whether there was any balm in Gilead at all and expect the question to sting.