the Brook Kanah: a ravine and seasonal stream in the central hill country that helped mark the border between the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled
In the book of Joshua this name first belongs to a watercourse, called the Brook Kanah, that served as part of the dividing line between two neighboring tribes. It ran through the central hill country and emptied westward into the Mediterranean Sea, and its channel formed a natural marker where the land of Ephraim met the land of Manasseh.
Both times the name appears here it is paired with the ordinary word for "a brook or ravine," so the reference is to the streambed itself rather than to a village. Like many such channels in the region, it was a wadi, a valley that carries running water in the rainy season and largely dries up in summer. Most scholars connect it with a wadi still known by a similar name that drains toward the coast near the region of ancient Shechem.
Jos 16:8Jos 17:9
2
Kanah: a town in the northern territory of the tribe of Asher, lying toward the region of Sidon
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled
This Kanah is a town, not a stream. It is named once, in a list of settlements assigned to the tribe of Asher along the northern coast, and it sits in the direction of the great city of Sidon. It is a different place from the Brook Kanah farther south, sharing only the name.
The exact site is uncertain. It lay somewhere in the hills inland from the Phoenician coast, in what is now southern Lebanon, but the proposals for its modern location vary and none is firmly settled.
Jos 19:28
Related words
The English words used to translate qanah
“Kanah”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
Standard lexicons (BDB, HALOT) list the name under at least two referents. The first is the Wadi Kanah (Naḥal Qanah) of Joshua 16:8 and 17:9, a seasonal stream draining westward to the Mediterranean along the Ephraim-Manasseh frontier, commonly identified with the modern Wadi Qanah in the hill country near Shechem. The second is a town of Asher in Joshua 19:28, located inland from the Phoenician coast toward Sidon, whose precise identification remains unsettled. The toponym is generally derived from qāneh, reed (a Wanderwort spanning Akkadian qanû, Aramaic qanyā, Greek kanna, Latin canna), rather than from the homographic verb qānāh, to acquire; the grouping of the name with that verb rests only on identical consonantal spelling.
In-depth research
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