ayin

The name is not an invented label. It is the ordinary Hebrew word for a spring of water, which is also the word for an eye (עַיִן). Naming a place for its water was completely normal, and this same border description does it twice: two verses earlier the line passes a settlement called Hazar-enan (חֲצַר עֵינוֹן), whose name is built on the same word.

One detail makes this appearance unusual. Hebrew puts "the" in front of the word here, and names almost never take "the". So the sentence can be read two ways: the border ran east of a place called Ain, or it simply ran east of the spring, with no settlement involved at all. Readers have gone both ways, and the choice decides whether the verse names a town or points at a water source.

Where it was, nobody knows. The border is traced from Shepham down past Riblah, then east of this point, and finally down to the eastern shoulder of the Sea of Galilee, which puts it somewhere in the well-watered country north or northeast of the lake. No site has ever been matched to it, and this is the only verse in the Bible that names it.

This is a wholly different place from the small southern town that carries the same name. Nothing links the two but the spelling.

This is a different place altogether from the marker on the northern frontier, and only the name connects them. It belongs to the parched southern edge of Judah's territory, the stretch of country where a spring is the whole reason a settlement exists at all. So the name is doing plain work: this was the town at the spring.

Nothing ever happens here. All four mentions are entries in lists, so the town's story is really the story of who held it:

• It appears among the towns of Judah's far south, at the end of a long roll of settlements.
• It is then handed on to Simeon, whose inheritance lay inside Judah's territory.
• It is set aside, along with its open pasture, as one of the towns given to the priests.
• It shows up once more among Simeon's holdings, in a summary that reaches down to David's reign.

Three of those four times it stands right beside Rimmon (רִמּוֹן), and later, in the same southern country, Nehemiah lists a single place called En-rimmon (עֵין רִמּוֹן), which is these two names written as one. That has made scholars ask whether "Ain, Rimmon" was ever two towns or one name that came apart in copying. The question stays open because the total at the end of Judah's southern roll is smaller than the number of names in it, so something there has been miscounted or misdivided. No one has identified the site.