ir

The Table of Nations lists what was built in Assyria in one breath: Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, and Calah. The middle name is two Hebrew words joined together. The first, "Rehoboth" (רְחֹבוֹת), means broad open spaces, the wide places inside a settlement. The second is the plain word for a town (עִיר). Word for word the pair says something close to "the broad places of a town."

Because the phrase reads as ordinary Hebrew, it has long been taken in more than one way:

• as the name of a settlement in its own right, which is how most modern Bibles print it, hyphenated and left untranslated;
• as a quarter of greater Nineveh, matching an Assyrian expression for the open ground of that city ("Rebit Ninua");
• as a description rather than a name at all, which is how the King James translators read it when they printed "the city Rehoboth."

No other verse mentions the place and no site has been identified with any confidence, so this single line is all the evidence there is.

He appears once, in the list of Benjamin's descendants, and nothing else is said about him: the verse names his sons, Shuppim and Huppim, and moves straight on.

The list around him is one of the hardest in the Bible to follow. It sets out from three sons of Benjamin, works through their families, and then arrives at names that are not clearly attached to any of them. This verse sits at that seam, which is why the man gets discussed far more than his one line would suggest. Most take him to be the same person called Iri (עִירִי) five verses earlier, a slightly longer form of the same name in the same family list. Others keep the two apart, and others judge the Hebrew of the verse to be damaged.

His name is written and said exactly like the ordinary word for a town (עִיר). Nothing in the verse plays on that, and Hebrew names often look like everyday words.