StrongerBible

eved

עֶבֶד

HebrewH5651Proper Noun“Ebed, son of Ebed, ...”

Appears 6 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Jdg 9:26Jdg 9:28Jdg 9:30Jdg 9:31Jdg 9:35Ezr 8:6
Word studyResearch-gradeEH-vedproper noun

What eved means

1

Ebed the father of Gaal: a man known only through his son, who led Shechem's short-lived revolt against Abimelech; the name is spelled with the everyday Hebrew word for a servant or slave

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

Ebed appears five times in a single chapter, and every time only as part of his son's name: "Gaal son of Ebed". Gaal turns up in Shechem with his relatives, wins the confidence of the townsmen, stands up in public to denounce Abimelech, marches out to fight him, and is thrown out of the city. Ebed himself does nothing at all. He is simply the father whose name identifies his son.

The name is the ordinary Hebrew word for a servant or slave (עֶבֶד). Names built on that word were common all over the region, and the fuller ones attach the name of a god: Obadiah (עֹבַדְיָהוּ) says "servant of the LORD", and Abdiel (עַבְדִּיאֵל) says "servant of God". A bare "Servant" is most likely a shortened form of a name like those, with the divine part left off, so it need not mean that anyone in the family was actually enslaved.

The story makes the name do work. Gaal's speech to the townsmen is one long complaint about serving the wrong man: "Who is Abimelech, and who is Shechem, that we should serve him? Serve the men of Hamor instead. Why should we serve him?" The verb for serving there (עָבַד) is built from the same three letters that spell his father's name, and it comes three times in that one outburst. So the man leading a revolt against serving Abimelech is introduced, over and over, as the son of Servant. Abimelech's own weak point in the chapter is the mirror image of it: the Shechemites are reminded that they crowned the son of a slave woman.

Because the names fit the story so neatly, some scholars think the storyteller shaped them rather than recorded them. Gaal's name is spelled like a Hebrew verb meaning to loathe (גָּעַל), which would make the pair of names something like "Loathsome son of a Slave", a jeer instead of a family record. Others take them as perfectly ordinary names, since names of exactly this shape turn up on Hebrew seals and all through the surrounding languages. Either way, nothing further is known about Ebed than the revolt his son started and lost.

Jdg 9:26Jdg 9:28Jdg 9:30Jdg 9:31Jdg 9:35

Disputed

Whether "son of Ebed" in Judges 9 preserves a real patronymic or is a pejorative label built into the narrative, in which Gaʿal ben ʿEbed is read as something like "Loathsome, son of Slave".

  • majorityAn ordinary personal name. The lexicons list the word here as a distinct proper name, and bare ʿbd is a standard hypocoristic of the very widely attested ʿbd + theophoric element type, paralleled in the Hebrew seal corpus and across Ugaritic, Phoenician and Akkadian onomastics.; F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), s.v. Ebed; L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, and J. J. Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, English ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1994-99), s.v. Ebed; Martin Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen im Rahmen der gemeinsemitischen Namengebung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1928)
  • minorityThe narrator's names are polemical, not archival: Gaʿal is heard against the root gʿl (to loathe) and ben ʿEbed as "son of a slave", so the pretender to Shechem is named "Loathsome, son of Slave" in a chapter already saturated with the ʿbd root and with Abimelech's own descent from a slave woman.; Robert G. Boling, Judges: Introduction, Translation and Commentary, Anchor Bible 6A (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), on Judges 9:26-41
2

Ebed son of Jonathan: one of the family heads who travelled back to Jerusalem from Babylon with Ezra, bringing fifty men of the family of Adin

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

This is a different man, living centuries after the first one. Ezra's record of the company that went up with him from Babylon to Jerusalem is a list of families, each with the name of the man who led its group and the number of men he brought. From the family of Adin (עָדִין) came Ebed son of Jonathan, and with him fifty men. That is everything the text says about him.

The family itself is better known than he is. Adin's household is named among those who had already come home in the first return, and it appears again later among the families who put their seal to Israel's renewed promise to keep the law. Ebed belonged, in other words, to a household that had been sending people back to Jerusalem for a generation before his own trip.

His name is once again the everyday Hebrew word for a servant, and by this period such names were still in ordinary use. One detail is worth knowing: the old Greek retelling of the same travel list gives this man's name as Obeth rather than Ebed, and counts two hundred and fifty men with him instead of fifty. So his name has not come down in exactly one form.

Ezr 8:6

What scholars say about eved

BDB and HALOT both list the personal name apart from the common noun, and neither reads the word in Judges 9 or Ezra 8:6 as the appellative. Noth's study of Israelite personal names classes bare ʿEbed as a hypocoristic of the ʿbd + theophoric element type, the most productive onomastic pattern in Northwest Semitic; the Hebrew seal and bulla corpus supplies abundant ʿbd names, and the Ugaritic, Phoenician-Punic and Akkadian parallels (ʿbdmlk, ʿbdmlqrt, Warad-Sîn) are collected in the standard reference works and surveyed in the TDOT article on the root. The live question in the Judges commentaries is literary rather than lexical. Boling's Anchor Bible volume reads Gaʿal ben ʿEbed as a pejorative coinage, "Loathsome, son of Slave", pointing to the root gʿl and to the concentration of ʿbd in Gaal's speech at 9:28, where the verb occurs three times; the chapter has already made Abimelech the son of a slave woman (9:18), so the derogatory reading has a context. Most recent commentary on Judges 9, including Sasson's Anchor Yale volume and Webb's NICOT volume, treats the patronymic as an ordinary name of a well-attested type while noting the wordplay the chapter exploits. Note also the pausal vocalization ʿābed at 9:30 alongside ʿebed elsewhere. For Ezra 8:6 the commentaries (Williamson, Blenkinsopp, Fensham) treat the man as one of the twelve or so lay family heads in the caravan list, from the bene Adin already registered at Ezra 2:15 and Nehemiah 7:20 and among the signatories at Nehemiah 10:16; the parallel list at 1 Esdras 8:32 reads Obeth and two hundred and fifty men, one of the many numerical and onomastic divergences between the two recensions discussed by Myers and by Talshir.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), s.v. Ebedlexicon
  • L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, and J. J. Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, English ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1994-99), s.v. Ebedlexicon
  • Martin Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen im Rahmen der gemeinsemitischen Namengebung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1928)monograph
  • H. Ringgren, U. Rüterswörden, and H. Simian-Yofre, "ʿabad," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 10:376-405dictionary
  • Nahman Avigad and Benjamin Sass, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1997)monograph
  • Robert G. Boling, Judges: Introduction, Translation and Commentary, Anchor Bible 6A (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), on Judges 9:26-41commentary
  • Jack M. Sasson, Judges 1-12: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Yale Bible 6D (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), on Judges 9commentary
  • Barry G. Webb, The Book of Judges, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), on Judges 9commentary
  • H. G. M. Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah, Word Biblical Commentary 16 (Waco: Word, 1985), on Ezra 8:1-14commentary
  • Joseph Blenkinsopp, Ezra-Nehemiah: A Commentary, Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988), on Ezra 8commentary
  • F. Charles Fensham, The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), on Ezra 8commentary
  • Jacob M. Myers, I and II Esdras, Anchor Bible 42 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974), on 1 Esdras 8commentary
  • Zipora Talshir, I Esdras: From Origin to Translation, SBL Septuagint and Cognate Studies 47 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999)monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of עֶבֶד

m

עֶבֶד, עָבֶד

Jdg 9:26, Jdg 9:28, Jdg 9:31, Jdg 9:35, Ezr 8:6, Jdg 9:30