Hebrew word · H5735

עֲדְעָדָה

ve'ad'adah

Adadah

As the Hebrew text stands, a town name found only here. The doubled form ʿad-ʿad has no clear meaning as a place name. Lexicons such as HALOT and BDB, and most modern atlases, suggest reading ʿarʿārâ instead: Aroer of the Negev, today Tel ʿAroer (Khirbet ʿArʿara), southeast of Beersheba.

Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·

What it means

§ Adadah = "festival" or "boundary"

one of the towns in the extreme south of Judah

Abridged from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).

In depth

From the study of Joshua 15:22

Range of meaning

As the Hebrew text stands, a town name found only here. The doubled form ʿad-ʿad has no clear meaning as a place name. Lexicons such as HALOT and BDB, and most modern atlases, suggest reading ʿarʿārâ instead: Aroer of the Negev, today Tel ʿAroer (Khirbet ʿArʿara), southeast of Beersheba.

Against the English

KJV, BSB, WEB, NIV and ESV all keep 'Adadah' as written in the standard Hebrew text. None of them signals in the main text that the name is probably a scribal slip for Aroer.

Used elsewhere in the period

Aroer is one of the Negev towns to which David sent a share of his plunder (1 Samuel 30:28). The Greek Septuagint here has a form with r (something like Arouēl), which supports a Hebrew original with resh. The ancient Hebrew letters dalet (ד) and resh (ר) were easy to confuse in copying.

Where it appears

Joshua · 1

  1. Joshua 15:22 וְעַדְעָדָֽה׃ and Adadah

    Kinah, Dimonah, Adadah,

    Here: The third town in this verse. No town by this exact name appears anywhere else in the Bible. Most scholars think the original was ʿArʿārâ, which is Aroer in the Negev, a known town east of Beersheba. The name was most likely miscopied when a resh (r) was mistaken for a dalet (d).

Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.