layish

Laish was a Canaanite city at the northern limit of the land, beside the springs that feed the Jordan below Mount Hermon. Judges 18 tells how five scouts from the tribe of Dan, who had never secured territory in the south, found its people living quietly and confidently, far from Sidon and with no allies to call on. The tribe attacked, burned the city, settled there, and renamed it Dan (דָּן) after their ancestor. From then on the Bible calls the place Dan, and Judges 18:29 pauses to record that Laish had been its name before.

The same city carries a second spelling elsewhere: Joshua 19:47 tells the story with the name Leshem (לֶשֶׁם). Almost everyone takes the two as one place, though how the two forms are related has never been settled.

The site is well known today as Tel Dan, one of the most thoroughly excavated mounds in Israel, and records from outside the Bible name the city centuries before the Israelites arrived: Egyptian curse texts, a list of towns conquered by Thutmose III, and an eighteenth century BC document from Mari recording tin shipped west to a man at Laish. Whether the name itself means "lion", from the rare poetic Hebrew word spelled exactly the same way (לַיִשׁ), is a traditional guess that has never been proved. The city was Canaanite rather than Israelite, so its name may not be Hebrew at all.

Laishah appears once, in Isaiah's roll call of towns on the path of an army closing in on Jerusalem. The prophet calls out to one settlement after another: Gallim, then Laishah, then Anathoth. Those neighbors all lie in Benjamin, a short way north of the city, which is why this Laishah is a different place from the far northern city of Laish that the tribe of Dan captured.

Nothing more is known about it. The town is named nowhere else, no ruin has been firmly identified as its site, and its name is simply a slightly longer form of the same word. Some readers take the line as a shout sent off toward the distant northern city instead of an address to a village nearby, but the towns listed on either side of it make a local settlement the natural reading.

Laish was also a man's name. He is mentioned twice, both times only as the father of Palti, who is also called Paltiel, of Gallim: the man to whom Saul gave his daughter Michal after taking her from David, and from whom she was later taken back again. Nothing else is said about him.

Naming a child after a powerful animal was ordinary in Israel and among its neighbors, and Hebrew has several lion names, so a man called Laish fits a familiar pattern. Even so, a name can be inherited or chosen for its sound, so this one need not have been picked for its meaning, and the meaning of the word behind it is itself unsettled.