ḥesed

The name turns up once, in the list of twelve officers Solomon set over Israel to provision the royal household, each of them responsible for one month of the year. The third man on that list is introduced only as Ben-Hesed, "son of Hesed", and his district was Arubboth, together with the town of Socoh and all the land of Hepher. Hesed himself does nothing in the story. He is simply the father whose name identifies his son.

Five of the twelve officers are listed this way, by a father's name rather than their own:

• Ben-Hur held the hill country of Ephraim.
• Ben-Deker held a cluster of towns around Beth-shemesh.
• Ben-Hesed held Arubboth, with Socoh and the land of Hepher.
• Ben-Abinadab held the coastal district of Dor and married a daughter of Solomon.
• Ben-Geber held Ramoth in Gilead, east of the Jordan.

The habit is regular enough to look deliberate, as though the palace record itself named these men that way, though some scholars think each officer's own name simply dropped out when the list was copied.

The name itself is the ordinary Hebrew word for steady, loyal kindness (חֶסֶד), the word Israel used above all for God keeping faith with his people. Building a child's name from it was normal practice: a longer name on the same idea, Hasadiah (חֲסַדְיָה), says outright that the LORD is faithful. So the bare name most likely carried a family's gratitude or hope, and it tells us nothing in particular about the man who bore it.

His son's district was worth having. The land of Hepher belonged to the old clan territory of Manasseh, and Socoh lay toward the fertile plain near the coast, so this was good grain country. That is the whole of what we know about the family: a name, a district, and one month a year at the head of the king's supply line.