Geshem: the Arabian who joined Sanballat and Tobiah in trying to stop the rebuilding of Jerusalem's wall
Geshem is the name of an Arabian who appears four times in the book of Nehemiah, always on the opposing side. He first shows up jeering at the builders and accusing them of rebelling against the Persian king (Nehemiah 2:19). He is named again when the wall stands finished and the enemies of the work hear of it (Nehemiah 6:1). Then he and Sanballat send an invitation to meet at a village out in the plain of Ono, which Nehemiah reads as a trap (Nehemiah 6:2), and he is quoted by name in the unsealed letter charging Nehemiah with planning to crown himself king (Nehemiah 6:6).
The book lines up three opponents around Judah, each pressing from a different side:
- Sanballat the Horonite, working from Samaria to the north
- Tobiah the Ammonite, tied to the territory east of the Jordan
- Geshem the Arabian, whose reach lay away to the south
Geshem is the one who comes from outside the immediate neighborhood, and that is probably the clue to his interest in the matter. The caravan routes that carried incense and spices from northwest Arabia toward Egypt ran past Judah, and a Jerusalem with walls and gates again was a new power sitting beside that road.
His name is written in Hebrew letters exactly like the everyday word for rain (גֶּשֶׁם), which is why reference works count the two as separate words. The likeness is only on the page. The name itself is Arabian, and it turns up all over the early inscriptions of northern Arabia, built on a root for what is solid or heavy, the same root behind the Aramaic word for a body (גְּשֵׁם).
One verse spells the name differently. Nehemiah 6:6 has "Gashmu," and that longer form is the best evidence that the man really was an Arabian: it keeps an old Arabic ending that Hebrew names do not carry, so "Geshem" looks like the trimmed local version of a foreign name. Outside the Bible, a silver bowl found in Egypt carries a gift dedication from "Qaynu son of Gashmu, king of Qedar," and most historians take that Gashmu to be the man Nehemiah faced, which would make him the head of a serious Arabian kingdom backed by Persia rather than a local nuisance.
Disputed
Whether the Geshem of Nehemiah is the Gashmu named as king of Qedar in the fifth-century Aramaic dedication on a silver bowl from Tell el-Maskhuta, and further whether he is the Gashm son of Shahr of the Lihyanite inscription JSLih 349.
- majorityGeshem is that Qedarite monarch, which places a substantial Arabian kingdom on Judah's southern flank under Achaemenid authority; the Lihyanite attestation would extend his reach to Dedan.; I. Rabinowitz, "Aramaic Inscriptions of the Fifth Century B.C.E. from a North-Arab Shrine in Egypt," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 15 (1956): 1-9; W. J. Dumbrell, "The Tell el-Maskhuta Bowls and the 'Kingdom' of Qedar in the Persian Period," BASOR 203 (1971): 33-44; F. M. Cross, "Geshem the Arabian, Enemy of Nehemiah," Biblical Archaeologist 18/2 (1955): 46-47; F. V. Winnett, A Study of the Lihyanite and Thamudic Inscriptions (University of Toronto Press, 1937), 14-16, 50-51; H. G. M. Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah, WBC 16 (Word, 1985), 190-91, 256; J. Blenkinsopp, Ezra-Nehemiah, OTL (Westminster, 1988), 225-26, 268-69
- minorityThe general framework is plausible, but the identification cannot be established: the name is so widely attested across North Arabian epigraphy that certainty about which bearer is meant is out of reach.; I. Eph'al, The Ancient Arabs: Nomads on the Borders of the Fertile Crescent, 9th-5th Centuries B.C. (Magnes / Brill, 1982), ch. 6