Joshua 15:27 — Word Study

Context — The Cities of Southern Judahgenerated

Cross References

The Key Word — חֶשְׁמוֹן, ve.chesh.Mongenerated

How Translations Differ — measured against the Berean Standard Biblegenerated

Sentence Structuregenerated

Septuagint Backgroundgenerated

In plain words — the whole versegenerated

Frequently Asked Questionsgenerated

Reflection Questionsgenerated

1. What do the names of these towns tell us about the land of Judah?
2. How can understanding the meanings of these names enhance our reading of the text?
3. In what ways does the geography of a place influence its history and culture?
4. What significance do you think these towns held for the people of Judah?

Commentators on this verse — 3 expositors, verse by verse

Each of these wrote on Joshua 15:27 itself, not merely on the chapter around it.

John Gill1697–1771Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

And Hazargaddah,.... The first of these, it is probable, is the same, Jerom (g) calls Gadda, in the tribe of Judah, which was in his day a village in the extreme borders of Daroma to the east,

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Robert Jamieson1802–1880Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown's Commentary

And Hazar-gaddah, and Heshmon, and Bethpalet, (14) And Hazar-gaddah - i:e., the enclosure of the kid (as En-gedi), identified by Wilton with Tamar (Ezekiel 47:19), the Thamara of the classics, in

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Charles John Ellicott1819–1905Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(21) And the uttermost cities.—The cities of the tribe of Judah are given under four heads: (a) towards Edom; (b) in the Shephêlah, or plain of the coast (Joshua 15:33, &c.); (c) in the mountains (Joshua 15:48); (d) in the wilderness (Joshua 15:61). Of those in Joshua 15:21-32, the first twenty-nine, Conder identifies only four—viz., Adadah, Joshua 15:22 (Ad’adah); Kerioth Hezron (some see a trace of Kerioth in the sobriquet of Judas Is-cariot, the man of Kerioth), Joshua 15:25 (Hudîreh); Beer-sheba, Joshua 15:28 (Bîr es-seb’a); and Ain Rimmon, Joshua 15:32 ( Umm er-Rumânûn). It is not easy to say precisely how the twenty-nine are to be obtained from the thirty-three, but evidently some of…

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The verse in English, compared — 17 translations, and where they part company

Every translation on this page is a decision someone had to make and commit to. Read down a column and you see one translator's judgement; read across a row and you see the range the Greek actually allows. The BSB is the wording the rest of this page is measured against, so it is listed first.

Counted from the translations carried on this site, not from a survey of every English Bible. A rendering shared by many versions is usually inherited rather than independently arrived at — the Tyndale line in particular runs through most of them.

The sentence as the grammar sees it — from the MACULA Hebrew treebank

This is not our own analysis: it is the scholarly syntax tree for the verse, showing how the clause actually holds together.

Boxes are the grammarian's groupings — clause, noun phrase, prepositional phrase.

The four witnesses to this verse — Masoretic, Septuagint, Samaritan, Qumran

The Masoretic Text lists the names as וַחֲצַ֥ר גַּדָּ֛ה וְחֶשְׁמוֹן וּבֵ֥ית פָּֽלֶט׃, while the Septuagint matches only two of the five words. This indicates a partial agreement between the two texts, with the Septuagint's word order and articles differing from the Hebrew.

Four traditions, not one. “On the leather” means the letters physically survive on the scroll, as against letters an editor has supplied to fill a hole in it — a restoration is a scholar’s reading, not a reading of the manuscript. Words in [square brackets] are supplied; the notes count them apart from what survives.

The map of this verse — what each word keeps company with

This is a map of two things, both counted rather than judged. Company kept: which words stand within three words of each of these, anywhere in the Hebrew Bible — the thicker the line, the more often the pair meet compared with chance. Built from: the words a word is made out of, taken from its own Strong’s entry. It is not a map of meaning: nothing here claims two words mean the same thing. Click any circle to see the numbers behind it.

Lexicons — every word in Joshua 15:27

One dossier per word, with every reference work grouped by kind — Hebrew lexicons, morphology, Bible dictionaries, topical chains and the English of the translators themselves. The verse sits at the head of each block with the word under study lit, so you never lose your place. The panel above gives the short answer; this is the long one, and it is the part of the page worth indexing.

Every entry below is the lexicographer's own text. On the Hebrew: Brown-Driver-Briggs entire and its gloss set, Strong's Hebrew Dictionary, and Tyndale House's Translators Brief lexicon. Where a cell says a work has no entry, that work genuinely has none for this word.