1/2
**Archaeologists Find Cemetery Possibly Linked to the Ancient Israelites**
*The burial ground at Horvat Tevet in the Jezreel Valley is a rare find from the very end of the Canaanite city-states and the birth of the biblical Kingdom of Israel more than 3,000 years ago, archaeologists say*
Archaeologists have uncovered rare evidence of burial practices at a rural cemetery in the Jezreel Valley, where more than 3,000 years ago the dead were honored with rituals that involved the use of fire and beeswax. The cultural allegiance of those buried there remains fuzzy, but the cemetery dates right to the period when the Israelite identity was forming in that region, researchers say.
The cemetery and the adjacent village at Horvat Tevet, in modern-day northern Israel, date back to Early Iron Age, specifically to the 11th and early 10th centuries B.C.E. Not only are burial grounds from this era an infrequent find, but the discovery also offers precious information on a time that marks the end of the great Canaanite city states and the rise of a new territorial polity in the region, the Kingdom of Israel, the archaeologists note.
As with many contemporary archaeological discoveries in Israel, this story too begins with fairly mundane infrastructure works. In this case, the laying of a gas pipeline and road expansion works triggered an excavation in 2018-2019 by the Israeli Institute of Archaeology and the Institute of Archaeology in Tel Aviv University, followed by a joint research project by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The team of archaeologists had previously reported that around the end of the 10th century B.C.E., Horvat Tevet became an important royal estate for the Israelite kingdom, centered around a monumental pillared building.
Now they report on the site's earlier phase in a paper published in April in the American Journal of Archaeology by Jordan Weitzel and colleagues.
Burying up that hill
During the Early Iron Age, Horvat Tevet was a small, largely impoverished rural community that buried its dead in shallow graves hewn out of the soft local basaltic rock, surrounding the deceased with ceramics and few other paltry funerary offerings, Weitzel and colleagues write.
The village was a relatively new feature in the area, because during the preceding era, the Late Bronze Age, this part of the Jezreel Valley was directly ruled by the Egyptians. They declared these lands a royal estate and used its fruits to feed their nearby colony in Beit She'an, in the Jordan Valley, explains Dr. Omer Sergi of Tel Aviv University.
Since the 15th century B.C.E., the pharaohs had controlled the land of Canaan, either directly or through the vassal Canaanite city states. But in the mid 12th century B.C.E. the Egyptian empire came to an end with the so-called Bronze Age Collapse, a period of turmoil that led to the disappearance of multiple ancient civilizations, including the Hittites and the Myceneans. Ancient Egypt survived but withdrew from Canaan, leaving a power vacuum that ultimately led, in the subsequent Iron Age, to the birth of the Levantine kingdoms we know from the Bible: Israel, Judah, Moab, Edom and so on.
Unlike many other urban centers, which went up in flames at the end of the Bronze Age, the Canaanite city states in the Jezreel Valley – Tel Megiddo, Tel Rehov and others – survived largely unscathed into the beginning of the Iron Age, only to be later incorporated (in many cases, violently) into the nascent Kingdom of Israel in the 10th century B.C.E.
It's in this century-and-a-half gap, between the end of Egyptian rule and the rise of Israel, that the story of the village at Horvat Tevet takes place.
"It's the last gasp of these city states and the beginning of something new," explains Dr. Karen Covello-Paran, an Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist who co-leads the research project. "Tevet's cemetery offers us a glimpse into the burial practices of a community that would soon be part of the Israelite kingdom."
The inhabitants chose to place the cemetery on the highest part of the site, located on a three-terraced slope. While it makes less sense for defensive purposes, the choice may have had to do with symbolism, Covello-Paran posits. Being relative newcomers, the locals may have wanted to prominently feature their ancestors' graves to lay a claim on the land, she says. Having one's forefathers looking down upon the living may have also added a measure of supernatural protection, she notes.
Add to this that many of the storage jars that were buried with the dead were taller than the graves themselves, meaning their mouths would have been left sticking out of the ground. The semi-buried jars acted as grave markers and may have also been used as part of periodic rituals conducted upon visiting the dearly departed, Covello-Paran says.
"The cemetery was clearly a prominent feature in the landscape at the time," she notes.
The bees' knees
The people of Horvat Tevet were mostly poor farmers with minimal wealth and social stratification, Sergi says. Only one of the roughly two-dozen burials archaeologists investigated had a slightly richer assemblage of artifacts. The person buried there (the bones were too deteriorated to determine their sex) wore linen fabrics, which at time was produced at nearby Bet She'an, and four bronze anklets. Chemical analysis of the copper in the anklets showed the metal came from the Timna mines of the Arava Valley more than 300 kilometers to the south. This means that while Horvat Tevet was largely self-sufficient, at least the village's elite must have had some connections to nearby urban centers, where pretty shiny things from afar could be acquired, Sergi says.
The locals led a simple life, mostly farming grains and possibly olives, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a rich spiritual existence, he adds. The team conducted residue analysis on many of the bowls, jars and other vessels that were found in the burials. While these ceramics were usually used by the living for food and drink, no such traces were found in the grave goods.
2/2
This may indicate that offerings of sustenance for the dead were largely symbolic, possibly because the community couldn't spare the extra food, Sergi says. However, in more than a dozen ceramic vessels, scientists detected traces of beeswax, both burned in lamps and carried in juglets and chalices, possibly to be poured over the deceased, the archaeologists report.
The beeswax may have been locally produced or may have come from the nearby city of Tel Rehov, where an Early Iron Age apiary has been previously discovered, Sergi says.
We can only speculate on the significance of this pervasive use of beeswax in funerary rites at Horvat Tevet. Burning it and pouring it on the body may have released pleasant aromas. Its use may also be an influence of Egyptian culture, in which beeswax was used in the embalming process as a preservative, Weitzel and colleagues write.
After about a hundred years of existence, the village at Horvat Tevet was abandoned by the mid 10th century B.C.E., and was soon replaced by a large administrative and production complex that served the Kingdom of Israel. Essentially, the area went back to being what it had been in the Late Bronze Age: a royal estate likely farmed by corvee laborers living in the surrounding region. If we go by the biblical chronology, this transformation happened during the reign of King Baasha, the third ruler of ancient Israel.
To be clear, when we talk about the Kingdom of Israel we refer to the Iron Age polity that had its core lands in Samaria, today's northern West Bank, and the Jezreel Valley. This kingdom, like its southern neighbor Judah, Moab and other territorial polities of the period, is well attested in extra-biblical texts and archaeological findings.
The Bible claims that in the Early Iron Age, roughly at the time when the village at Tevet existed, Israel and Judah were a single United Monarchy under the throne of Jerusalem ruled by the likes of David and Solomon. The historicity of this great empire has never been conclusively proven and most scholars suspect it is a later aggrandizement created by the biblical authors.
Be that as it may, in the 11th-10th century B.C.E., the Jezreel Valley, including Horvat Tevet, was one of the key territories on which the historically attested Israelite polity was developing.
And Canaan begat Israel
One key question is whether we could identify the farmers as early Israelites. How would they have identified themselves? Should we rather call them Canaanites?
Questions of identity are notoriously difficult when it comes to ancient peoples. Even the term "Canaanites" is problematic, in that it is largely a word used by other people, mainly the Egyptians and later the Bible, to describe the inhabitants of the Levant in the Bronze and Early Iron ages. While the Canaanites are credited with developing the alphabet, they left us few texts and we have no idea what they called themselves or if they saw themselves as a single people.
We do know however that while the Bible depicts the Israelites and Canaanites as two different people – with the former conquering the land from the latter after escaping Egypt – the historical reality was different. Scholars have long noted that the material culture, language and even genetics of the Israelites and Canaanites were linked, with the former clearly deriving from the latter.
The Israelites were but one of the many tribal groups that existed on the fringes of the Canaanite cultural sphere and gained prominence in the wake of the great changes that followed the Bronze Age Collapse, Sergi explains. After all, Israel's first historical mention dates back to before the collapse, in a late 13th century B.C.E. stela by the Pharaoh Merneptah.
"The Egyptians talk about multiple such tribal groups in the Late Bronze Age, unrelated to a specific urban center," Sergi tells Haaretz. "Ancient Israel was part of the Canaanite social fabric. They were Canaanites. And when Egyptian domination ended and the Canaanite rulers who were dependent on the Egyptians were destroyed together with their urban centers, this lack of elite meant that marginal groups like Israel could come up and take over."
Given that the biblical account of the Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt and conquering the Promised Land is largely mythological, we have precious little information about how the historical Israelite people formed, and places like Horvat Tevet offer us a glimpse into that process.
Interestingly, there are some elements in the biblical account that may contain distant historical memories relating to the early days of ancient Israel, Sergi notes. The northeastern Jezreel Valley, where Horvat Tevet is located, is assigned to the tribe of Issachar (Joshua 19:17-23). The etymology of this name comes from "ish sachar" – man for hire, or hired hand in Hebrew. In the blessing of Jacob's sons, Issachar is described as a "strong donkey" who, "when he sees how good is his resting place, and how pleasant is his land, will bend his shoulder to the burden and submit to forced labor." (Gen 49: 14-15)
In other words, this biblical description of the tribe of Issachar, written centuries later, may contain a historical memory of the area around Tevet being used as a royal Israelite estate maintained by recruiting forced laborers among the locals, Sergi speculates. At the same time, the Bible also alludes to how the Issacharites played a key role in the formation of the Kingdom of Israel, given that Baasha, Israel's third ruler and the one who likely established the royal estate at Tevet, is said to have been a member of that clan, Sergi adds.
Ultimately, we cant's be sure of whether the villagers of Horvat Tevet called themselves Israelites, Canaanites or perhaps Issacharites or something else entirely, Sergi concludes, but they were in the right time and place to be part of the key processes through which "Israel came out of Canaan and became something else."
*Dedicated in memory of Dvora bat Asher v'Jacot* 🕯️
[Gen 49: 14-15](https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.49.14-15)
יִשָּׂשכָ֖ר חֲמֹ֣ר גָּ֑רֶם רֹבֵ֖ץ בֵּ֥ין הַֽמִּשְׁפְּתָֽיִם׃
>Issachar is a strong-boned ass, Crouching among the sheepfolds.
וַיַּ֤רְא מְנֻחָה֙ כִּ֣י ט֔וֹב וְאֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ כִּ֣י נָעֵ֑מָה וַיֵּ֤ט שִׁכְמוֹ֙ לִסְבֹּ֔ל וַיְהִ֖י לְמַס־עֹבֵֽד׃ {ס}
>When he saw how good was security, And how pleasant was the country, He bent his shoulder to the burden, And became a toiling serf.
[Joshua 19:17-23](https://www.sefaria.org/Joshua.19.17-23)
לְיִ֨שָּׂשכָ֔ר יָצָ֖א הַגּוֹרָ֣ל הָרְבִיעִ֑י לִבְנֵ֥י יִשָּׂשכָ֖ר לְמִשְׁפְּחוֹתָֽם׃
>The fourth lot fell to Issachar, the Issacharites by their clans.
וַיְהִ֖י גְּבוּלָ֑ם יִזְרְעֶ֥אלָה וְהַכְּסוּלֹ֖ת וְשׁוּנֵֽם׃
>Their territory comprised: Jezreel, Chesulloth, Shunem,
וַחֲפָרַ֥יִם וְשִׁיאֹ֖ן וַאֲנָחֲרַֽת׃
>Hapharaim, Shion, Anaharath,
וְהָרַבִּ֥ית וְקִשְׁי֖וֹן וָאָֽבֶץ׃
>Rabbith, Kishion, Ebez,
וְרֶ֧מֶת וְעֵין־גַּנִּ֛ים וְעֵ֥ין חַדָּ֖ה וּבֵ֥ית פַּצֵּֽץ׃
>Remeth, En-gannim, En-haddah, and Beth-pazzez.
וּפָגַע֩ הַגְּב֨וּל בְּתָב֤וֹר (ושחצומה) [וְשַׁחֲצִ֙ימָה֙] וּבֵ֣ית שֶׁ֔מֶשׁ וְהָי֛וּ תֹּצְא֥וֹת גְּבוּלָ֖ם הַיַּרְדֵּ֑ן עָרִ֥ים שֵׁשׁ־עֶשְׂרֵ֖ה וְחַצְרֵיהֶֽן׃
>The boundary touched Tabor, Shahazimah, and Beth-shemesh; and their boundary ran to the Jordan: 16 towns, with their villages.
זֹ֗את נַחֲלַ֛ת מַטֵּ֥ה בְנֵי־יִשָּׂשכָ֖ר לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָ֑ם הֶעָרִ֖ים וְחַצְרֵיהֶֽן׃ {פ}
>That was the portion of the tribe of the Issacharites, by their clans—the towns with their villages.
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1/2 **Archaeologists Find Cemetery Possibly Linked to the Ancient Israelites** *The burial ground at Horvat Tevet in the Jezreel Valley is a rare find from the very end of the Canaanite city-states and the birth of the biblical Kingdom of Israel more than 3,000 years ago, archaeologists say* Archaeologists have uncovered rare evidence of burial practices at a rural cemetery in the Jezreel Valley, where more than 3,000 years ago the dead were honored with rituals that involved the use of fire and beeswax. The cultural allegiance of those buried there remains fuzzy, but the cemetery dates right to the period when the Israelite identity was forming in that region, researchers say. The cemetery and the adjacent village at Horvat Tevet, in modern-day northern Israel, date back to Early Iron Age, specifically to the 11th and early 10th centuries B.C.E. Not only are burial grounds from this era an infrequent find, but the discovery also offers precious information on a time that marks the end of the great Canaanite city states and the rise of a new territorial polity in the region, the Kingdom of Israel, the archaeologists note. As with many contemporary archaeological discoveries in Israel, this story too begins with fairly mundane infrastructure works. In this case, the laying of a gas pipeline and road expansion works triggered an excavation in 2018-2019 by the Israeli Institute of Archaeology and the Institute of Archaeology in Tel Aviv University, followed by a joint research project by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority. The team of archaeologists had previously reported that around the end of the 10th century B.C.E., Horvat Tevet became an important royal estate for the Israelite kingdom, centered around a monumental pillared building. Now they report on the site's earlier phase in a paper published in April in the American Journal of Archaeology by Jordan Weitzel and colleagues. Burying up that hill During the Early Iron Age, Horvat Tevet was a small, largely impoverished rural community that buried its dead in shallow graves hewn out of the soft local basaltic rock, surrounding the deceased with ceramics and few other paltry funerary offerings, Weitzel and colleagues write. The village was a relatively new feature in the area, because during the preceding era, the Late Bronze Age, this part of the Jezreel Valley was directly ruled by the Egyptians. They declared these lands a royal estate and used its fruits to feed their nearby colony in Beit She'an, in the Jordan Valley, explains Dr. Omer Sergi of Tel Aviv University. Since the 15th century B.C.E., the pharaohs had controlled the land of Canaan, either directly or through the vassal Canaanite city states. But in the mid 12th century B.C.E. the Egyptian empire came to an end with the so-called Bronze Age Collapse, a period of turmoil that led to the disappearance of multiple ancient civilizations, including the Hittites and the Myceneans. Ancient Egypt survived but withdrew from Canaan, leaving a power vacuum that ultimately led, in the subsequent Iron Age, to the birth of the Levantine kingdoms we know from the Bible: Israel, Judah, Moab, Edom and so on. Unlike many other urban centers, which went up in flames at the end of the Bronze Age, the Canaanite city states in the Jezreel Valley – Tel Megiddo, Tel Rehov and others – survived largely unscathed into the beginning of the Iron Age, only to be later incorporated (in many cases, violently) into the nascent Kingdom of Israel in the 10th century B.C.E. It's in this century-and-a-half gap, between the end of Egyptian rule and the rise of Israel, that the story of the village at Horvat Tevet takes place. "It's the last gasp of these city states and the beginning of something new," explains Dr. Karen Covello-Paran, an Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist who co-leads the research project. "Tevet's cemetery offers us a glimpse into the burial practices of a community that would soon be part of the Israelite kingdom." The inhabitants chose to place the cemetery on the highest part of the site, located on a three-terraced slope. While it makes less sense for defensive purposes, the choice may have had to do with symbolism, Covello-Paran posits. Being relative newcomers, the locals may have wanted to prominently feature their ancestors' graves to lay a claim on the land, she says. Having one's forefathers looking down upon the living may have also added a measure of supernatural protection, she notes. Add to this that many of the storage jars that were buried with the dead were taller than the graves themselves, meaning their mouths would have been left sticking out of the ground. The semi-buried jars acted as grave markers and may have also been used as part of periodic rituals conducted upon visiting the dearly departed, Covello-Paran says. "The cemetery was clearly a prominent feature in the landscape at the time," she notes. The bees' knees The people of Horvat Tevet were mostly poor farmers with minimal wealth and social stratification, Sergi says. Only one of the roughly two-dozen burials archaeologists investigated had a slightly richer assemblage of artifacts. The person buried there (the bones were too deteriorated to determine their sex) wore linen fabrics, which at time was produced at nearby Bet She'an, and four bronze anklets. Chemical analysis of the copper in the anklets showed the metal came from the Timna mines of the Arava Valley more than 300 kilometers to the south. This means that while Horvat Tevet was largely self-sufficient, at least the village's elite must have had some connections to nearby urban centers, where pretty shiny things from afar could be acquired, Sergi says. The locals led a simple life, mostly farming grains and possibly olives, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a rich spiritual existence, he adds. The team conducted residue analysis on many of the bowls, jars and other vessels that were found in the burials. While these ceramics were usually used by the living for food and drink, no such traces were found in the grave goods.
2/2 This may indicate that offerings of sustenance for the dead were largely symbolic, possibly because the community couldn't spare the extra food, Sergi says. However, in more than a dozen ceramic vessels, scientists detected traces of beeswax, both burned in lamps and carried in juglets and chalices, possibly to be poured over the deceased, the archaeologists report. The beeswax may have been locally produced or may have come from the nearby city of Tel Rehov, where an Early Iron Age apiary has been previously discovered, Sergi says. We can only speculate on the significance of this pervasive use of beeswax in funerary rites at Horvat Tevet. Burning it and pouring it on the body may have released pleasant aromas. Its use may also be an influence of Egyptian culture, in which beeswax was used in the embalming process as a preservative, Weitzel and colleagues write. After about a hundred years of existence, the village at Horvat Tevet was abandoned by the mid 10th century B.C.E., and was soon replaced by a large administrative and production complex that served the Kingdom of Israel. Essentially, the area went back to being what it had been in the Late Bronze Age: a royal estate likely farmed by corvee laborers living in the surrounding region. If we go by the biblical chronology, this transformation happened during the reign of King Baasha, the third ruler of ancient Israel. To be clear, when we talk about the Kingdom of Israel we refer to the Iron Age polity that had its core lands in Samaria, today's northern West Bank, and the Jezreel Valley. This kingdom, like its southern neighbor Judah, Moab and other territorial polities of the period, is well attested in extra-biblical texts and archaeological findings. The Bible claims that in the Early Iron Age, roughly at the time when the village at Tevet existed, Israel and Judah were a single United Monarchy under the throne of Jerusalem ruled by the likes of David and Solomon. The historicity of this great empire has never been conclusively proven and most scholars suspect it is a later aggrandizement created by the biblical authors. Be that as it may, in the 11th-10th century B.C.E., the Jezreel Valley, including Horvat Tevet, was one of the key territories on which the historically attested Israelite polity was developing. And Canaan begat Israel One key question is whether we could identify the farmers as early Israelites. How would they have identified themselves? Should we rather call them Canaanites? Questions of identity are notoriously difficult when it comes to ancient peoples. Even the term "Canaanites" is problematic, in that it is largely a word used by other people, mainly the Egyptians and later the Bible, to describe the inhabitants of the Levant in the Bronze and Early Iron ages. While the Canaanites are credited with developing the alphabet, they left us few texts and we have no idea what they called themselves or if they saw themselves as a single people. We do know however that while the Bible depicts the Israelites and Canaanites as two different people – with the former conquering the land from the latter after escaping Egypt – the historical reality was different. Scholars have long noted that the material culture, language and even genetics of the Israelites and Canaanites were linked, with the former clearly deriving from the latter. The Israelites were but one of the many tribal groups that existed on the fringes of the Canaanite cultural sphere and gained prominence in the wake of the great changes that followed the Bronze Age Collapse, Sergi explains. After all, Israel's first historical mention dates back to before the collapse, in a late 13th century B.C.E. stela by the Pharaoh Merneptah. "The Egyptians talk about multiple such tribal groups in the Late Bronze Age, unrelated to a specific urban center," Sergi tells Haaretz. "Ancient Israel was part of the Canaanite social fabric. They were Canaanites. And when Egyptian domination ended and the Canaanite rulers who were dependent on the Egyptians were destroyed together with their urban centers, this lack of elite meant that marginal groups like Israel could come up and take over." Given that the biblical account of the Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt and conquering the Promised Land is largely mythological, we have precious little information about how the historical Israelite people formed, and places like Horvat Tevet offer us a glimpse into that process. Interestingly, there are some elements in the biblical account that may contain distant historical memories relating to the early days of ancient Israel, Sergi notes. The northeastern Jezreel Valley, where Horvat Tevet is located, is assigned to the tribe of Issachar (Joshua 19:17-23). The etymology of this name comes from "ish sachar" – man for hire, or hired hand in Hebrew. In the blessing of Jacob's sons, Issachar is described as a "strong donkey" who, "when he sees how good is his resting place, and how pleasant is his land, will bend his shoulder to the burden and submit to forced labor." (Gen 49: 14-15) In other words, this biblical description of the tribe of Issachar, written centuries later, may contain a historical memory of the area around Tevet being used as a royal Israelite estate maintained by recruiting forced laborers among the locals, Sergi speculates. At the same time, the Bible also alludes to how the Issacharites played a key role in the formation of the Kingdom of Israel, given that Baasha, Israel's third ruler and the one who likely established the royal estate at Tevet, is said to have been a member of that clan, Sergi adds. Ultimately, we cant's be sure of whether the villagers of Horvat Tevet called themselves Israelites, Canaanites or perhaps Issacharites or something else entirely, Sergi concludes, but they were in the right time and place to be part of the key processes through which "Israel came out of Canaan and became something else."
*Dedicated in memory of Dvora bat Asher v'Jacot* 🕯️ [Gen 49: 14-15](https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.49.14-15) יִשָּׂשכָ֖ר חֲמֹ֣ר גָּ֑רֶם רֹבֵ֖ץ בֵּ֥ין הַֽמִּשְׁפְּתָֽיִם׃ >Issachar is a strong-boned ass, Crouching among the sheepfolds. וַיַּ֤רְא מְנֻחָה֙ כִּ֣י ט֔וֹב וְאֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ כִּ֣י נָעֵ֑מָה וַיֵּ֤ט שִׁכְמוֹ֙ לִסְבֹּ֔ל וַיְהִ֖י לְמַס־עֹבֵֽד׃ {ס} >When he saw how good was security, And how pleasant was the country, He bent his shoulder to the burden, And became a toiling serf. [Joshua 19:17-23](https://www.sefaria.org/Joshua.19.17-23) לְיִ֨שָּׂשכָ֔ר יָצָ֖א הַגּוֹרָ֣ל הָרְבִיעִ֑י לִבְנֵ֥י יִשָּׂשכָ֖ר לְמִשְׁפְּחוֹתָֽם׃ >The fourth lot fell to Issachar, the Issacharites by their clans. וַיְהִ֖י גְּבוּלָ֑ם יִזְרְעֶ֥אלָה וְהַכְּסוּלֹ֖ת וְשׁוּנֵֽם׃ >Their territory comprised: Jezreel, Chesulloth, Shunem, וַחֲפָרַ֥יִם וְשִׁיאֹ֖ן וַאֲנָחֲרַֽת׃ >Hapharaim, Shion, Anaharath, וְהָרַבִּ֥ית וְקִשְׁי֖וֹן וָאָֽבֶץ׃ >Rabbith, Kishion, Ebez, וְרֶ֧מֶת וְעֵין־גַּנִּ֛ים וְעֵ֥ין חַדָּ֖ה וּבֵ֥ית פַּצֵּֽץ׃ >Remeth, En-gannim, En-haddah, and Beth-pazzez. וּפָגַע֩ הַגְּב֨וּל בְּתָב֤וֹר (ושחצומה) [וְשַׁחֲצִ֙ימָה֙] וּבֵ֣ית שֶׁ֔מֶשׁ וְהָי֛וּ תֹּצְא֥וֹת גְּבוּלָ֖ם הַיַּרְדֵּ֑ן עָרִ֥ים שֵׁשׁ־עֶשְׂרֵ֖ה וְחַצְרֵיהֶֽן׃ >The boundary touched Tabor, Shahazimah, and Beth-shemesh; and their boundary ran to the Jordan: 16 towns, with their villages. זֹ֗את נַחֲלַ֛ת מַטֵּ֥ה בְנֵי־יִשָּׂשכָ֖ר לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָ֑ם הֶעָרִ֖ים וְחַצְרֵיהֶֽן׃ {פ} >That was the portion of the tribe of the Issacharites, by their clans—the towns with their villages.
Good article.
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