StrongerBible

ashan

עָשָׁן

HebrewH6228Proper Noun“Ashan”

Appears 4 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Jos 15:42Jos 19:71Ch 4:321Ch 6:59(44)
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeah-SHAHNproper noun

What ashan means

Ashan: a small town in the dry southern country of Judah, later counted among Simeon's towns, whose name is the ordinary Hebrew word for smoke

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

Ashan is a place, and it never appears in a story. All four of its mentions sit in lists: the roll of towns given to Judah, the roll given to Simeon, the Chronicler's version of Simeon's villages, and the Chronicler's list of towns handed over to the priests. Those lists put it in the dry southern edge of Judah's territory, in the low country running down toward Beersheba. Where it actually stood is not known. A ruin near Beersheba still carries a form of the name and has often been proposed, but the material found there looks too late for a town of that period, so the site remains an open question.

The name is the everyday Hebrew word for smoke (עָשָׁן), written and pronounced exactly the same way. To anyone who spoke Hebrew the town was simply called Smoke. Why is anyone's guess: a lime kiln, a burnt hillside, a smoking pit. The same word stands inside the longer name Bor-Ashan (בּוֹר עָשָׁן), something like "Smoke Pit," one of the southern places David sent a share of recovered plunder to, and a good many scholars take that to be this same town under a fuller name.

The four lists give the town three different addresses, which sounds like a contradiction and is not one:

  • Judah's town list counts it among the settlements of the southern low country
  • Simeon's allotment counts it as one of four towns belonging to that tribe
  • the Chronicler's roll of Simeon's villages counts it as one of five
  • the Chronicler's list of priestly towns counts it, with its surrounding pastureland, among the towns Judah and Simeon handed over

Simeon's inheritance lay inside Judah's territory, so a single town could stand in both tribal registers at once, and a town set aside for the priests still sat on tribal ground. The one real puzzle is smaller and textual: Joshua's parallel list of priestly towns names Ain (עַיִן) in the slot where Chronicles names Ashan, and nobody has settled which name stood there first.

Jos 15:42Jos 19:71Ch 4:321Ch 6:59(44)

What scholars say about ashan

The lexica treat this as the common noun for smoke used as a place name and give it no separate etymology: BDB 799 lists Ashan as a city of Judah later reckoned to Simeon and cross-references Bor-Ashan (Chor-Ashan) of 1 Samuel 30:30; HALOT s.v. II and DCH VI s.v. agree, as does Gesenius 18th ed. The four attestations fall into two documentary complexes. The first is the Judah and Simeon town list of Joshua 15 and 19, whose relationship has been argued since Alt's study of the Judahite districts: Joshua 19:1-9 states explicitly that Simeon's towns were drawn from within Judah's inheritance, and Kallai and Aharoni both treat the Simeon roster as an administrative subset of the larger Judahite list, which accounts for Ashan standing in both. The Chronicler's parallel at 1 Chronicles 4:28-33 diverges in detail, reading Tochen where Joshua 19:7 has Ether and counting five towns rather than four; Williamson and Japhet treat the divergence as transmission history rather than as evidence of two different places, and many read Joshua's sequence Ain plus Rimmon as the single toponym En-Rimmon attested at Nehemiah 11:29. The second complex is the Levitical city list, where 1 Chronicles 6:59 (Hebrew 6:44) assigns Ashan with its pasture lands to the Aaronide priests while the parallel at Joshua 21:16 has Ain in the corresponding slot; Albright's classic reconstruction of the Levitical list and Knoppers's Anchor Bible treatment of 1 Chronicles 6 both register the discrepancy, and the usual judgment is that one name displaced the other in transmission, though the direction is unsettled. Site identification is likewise open. Khirbet Asan northwest of Beersheba preserves the name and was proposed by the nineteenth century surveys, but the surface material recovered there is generally regarded as too late for an Iron Age settlement, and the historical geographies list the equation as tentative. The frequent identification with Bor-Ashan of 1 Samuel 30:30, which fits the Negev distribution of David's gift list, remains plausible but unproven.

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), 799lexicon
  • L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, and J. J. Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, study ed. 2001), s.v.lexicon
  • D. J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew VI (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2007), s.v.lexicon
  • R. Meyer and H. Donner, eds., Wilhelm Gesenius Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament, 18th ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1987-2012), s.v.lexicon
  • A. Alt, "Judas Gaue unter Josia," Palastinajahrbuch 21 (1925): 100-116article
  • Z. Kallai, Historical Geography of the Bible: The Tribal Territories of Israel (Jerusalem: Magnes; Leiden: Brill, 1986)monograph
  • Y. Aharoni, The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography, rev. ed., trans. A. F. Rainey (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979)monograph
  • W. F. Albright, "The List of Levitic Cities," in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), 49-73article
  • G. N. Knoppers, I Chronicles 1-9, AB 12 (New York: Doubleday, 2003)commentary
  • S. Japhet, I and II Chronicles, OTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993)commentary
  • H. G. M. Williamson, 1 and 2 Chronicles, NCBC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982)commentary
  • R. D. Nelson, Joshua, OTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997)commentary
  • T. C. Butler, Joshua 13-24, 2nd ed., WBC 7B (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014)commentary
  • A. F. Rainey and R. S. Notley, The Sacred Bridge: Carta's Atlas of the Biblical World (Jerusalem: Carta, 2006)monograph

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

All attested forms of עָשָׁן

noun

עָשָׁן

Jos 15:42, Jos 19:7, 1Ch 4:32, 1Ch 6:59