Cun: a town in the Aramean kingdom of Hadadezer, stripped of its bronze when David defeated him
This name appears once. Chronicles tells how David defeated Hadadezer, the king of an Aramean kingdom north of Israel, and then carried off the bronze stored in two of his towns, Tibhath (טִבְחַת) and Cun (1 Chronicles 18:8). The verse goes on to say what became of the metal: Solomon later used it for the great basin, the pillars, and the vessels of the temple. So the whole of what the Bible tells us about Cun is that it was rich in bronze and that its wealth ended up in Jerusalem.
The older telling of the same campaign names the two towns differently. There David takes bronze from Betah and from Berothai (בֵּרֹתַי), in the same order and almost the same words (2 Samuel 8:8). Cun therefore stands in the slot where the earlier account has Berothai, and readers have long taken the two as one town under two names. Why the names differ is an open question.
- The writer of Chronicles may have known these towns by other names, perhaps ones current in his own day.
- The copy of the older account he worked from may already have read differently from the one that has come down to us.
- One or both names may have been reshaped as the books were copied, which is the usual fate of unfamiliar foreign place names.
Where Cun actually stood is unknown. It lay somewhere in the Aramean territory Hadadezer controlled, north of Israel in what is now Lebanon or southern Syria, and reference works have long looked for it in the Beqaa valley. Nothing has been confirmed, and no ruin has been securely tied to the name.
The name is written exactly like the ordinary Hebrew word for setting something firmly in place (כּוּן), which is why the two sit side by side in a Hebrew dictionary. That match may be nothing more than a coincidence of spelling. This was a foreign town in Aramean country, and its name need not have been a Hebrew word at all.