Hebrew word · H8483

תַּחְתִּים חׇדְשִׁי

tachtim

Kadesh

A place name found only here. Taken word by word, the Hebrew could be read as 'lower parts of Hodshi', or even 'lower ones of my new moon'. Neither makes sense as a district name, and no place called this is known from the Bible, inscriptions, or ancient geography.

Appears 2 times in 1 verses of the Hebrew Old Testament. ·

What it means

§ Tahtim-hodshi = "lowest-moon"

a place near Gilead on the east of the Jordan

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 2 Samuel 24:6

Range of meaning

A place name found only here. Taken word by word, the Hebrew could be read as 'lower parts of Hodshi', or even 'lower ones of my new moon'. Neither makes sense as a district name, and no place called this is known from the Bible, inscriptions, or ancient geography.

Against the English

KJV, BSB, WEB, YLT, NASB and NIV simply spell out the Hebrew as 'Tahtim-hodshi'. ESV and NRSV instead follow a Greek reading: 'Kadesh in the land of the Hittites'. The Vulgate translated it as 'the lower land of Hodshi'.

Used elsewhere in the period

Greek manuscripts differ widely here. The Lucianic Greek tradition (an important early revision of the Septuagint) reads 'into the land of the Hittites, Kadesh' (eis gēn Chettieim Kadēs). Codex Vaticanus has garbled spellings that also seem to go back to a damaged Hebrew text. From this, scholars since Wellhausen and Driver have reconstructed an original Hebrew ʾereṣ ha-ḥittîm qādēšâ, 'the land of the Hittites, toward Kadesh'. In that case taḥtîm is a corruption of ha-ḥittîm, and ḥoḏšî of qādēšâ.

Where it appears

2 Samuel · 2

  1. 2 Samuel 24:6 תַּחְתִּ֖ים חָדְשִׁ֑י Tahtim, Hodshi

    Then they went to Gilead and the land of Tahtim-hodshi, and on to Dan-jaan and around to Sidon.

    Here: The first half of 'Tahtim-hodshi', a name found nowhere else in the Bible. It looks like the Hebrew word for 'lower parts', and the Latin Vulgate translated it that way. Most scholars think the text is damaged here (see textual notes).

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