sheva

Sheba appears only in 2 Samuel 20, right after Absalom's revolt has collapsed and David is on his way back to Jerusalem. A bitter argument breaks out between Judah and the rest of Israel over who has the greater claim on the king, and Sheba, introduced as "a worthless man," seizes the moment. He blows the ram's horn and shouts the cry that becomes the whole rebellion's slogan: "We have no portion in David, no inheritance in the son of Jesse; every man to his tents, O Israel!" The whole of Israel deserts David and follows him; only Judah stays loyal.

David treats this new threat as more dangerous than Absalom's own revolt and moves fast to put it down. When Amasa is too slow gathering Judah's troops, David sends Abishai after Sheba, but it is Joab who actually takes charge, killing Amasa on the road and leading the pursuit himself. Joab chases Sheba the length of the country and finally traps him inside the northern town of Abel Beth-maacah, where he begins building a siege ramp against the wall.

The siege ends not through a battle but through a conversation. A wise woman inside the town negotiates with Joab, then persuades the townspeople to cut off Sheba's head and throw it over the wall to him. Joab calls off the siege and the town is spared. Nothing further is told about Sheba; the story remembers him only for the revolt he started and how quickly it was ended.

His name is spelled exactly like the everyday Hebrew word for the number שֶׁבַע, "seven." Hebrew names were often built directly on ordinary words like this one, so the coincidence needs no special explanation on its own; the text never draws attention to it here, unlike the wordplay it makes around this very same word at Beersheba.

Joshua 19:1-9 gives the tribe of Simeon a set of towns carved out from Judah's much larger territory. The list opens with Beersheba, and "Sheba" is named right after it, as though it were a second town in its own right.

The list as written names fourteen towns, yet the passage itself totals them as "thirteen towns with their villages," one short of the actual count. Chronicles' parallel list of Simeon's towns also opens with Beersheba, but has no separate "Sheba" following it. Taken together, these two facts point the same way: most who study these lists conclude that "Sheba" here is not a genuinely separate place at all, but Beersheba's own name copied down a second time, most likely because a copyist's eye caught the matching letters twice in a row.

That reading cannot be proven with certainty from a single list, so it is offered here as the best-supported answer rather than a settled fact. If it is right, this occurrence does not add a fourth place named "Sheba" to the map at all; it simply is Beersheba, named once more.

This is a different man from the rebel of 2 Samuel 20, living generations later. He appears once, inside Chronicles' record of the tribe of Gad, which settled in Bashan on the eastern side of the Jordan. The list names the family's leading men before tracing the tribe down to its exile by Assyria.

Sheba is named as one of seven brothers, sons of Abihail: Michael, Meshullam, Sheba, Jorai, Jacan, Zia, and Eber. Nothing else is told about him; like his brothers, he survives only as a name in a family record kept to preserve the tribe's memory of its own leadership, not to tell any one man's story.

The list happens to name exactly seven brothers, one of them called Seven, though the text gives no sign that it noticed the coincidence itself.