Aphek (biblical)
The name Aphek or Aphec[1] refers to one of several locations mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as the scenes of a number of battles between the Israelites and the Arameans and Philistines:
- Most famously, a town near which one or more rulers of Damascus named Ben-hadad were defeated by the Israelites and in which the Damascene king and his surviving soldiers found a safe place of retreat (1 Kings 20:26–30; 2 Kings 13:17, 24–25). Just before his death, the prophet Elisha predicted:
- "The arrow of the Lord's deliverance and the arrow of deliverance from Syria; for you must strike the Syrians at Aphek till you have destroyed them (2 Kings 13:17).
- A place at which the Bible states that the Philistines had encamped, while the Israelites pitched in Eben-Ezer, before the Battle of Aphek in which the sons of Eli were killed (I Samuel 4:1–ff.)
- A city of the defeat and death of Saul.
- Aphik, a city of the tribe of Asher, identified as either Tel Afek near Haifa, or Afqa in Lebanon.
Location
Golan or eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee
After the turn of the 20th century the predominant opinion was that the location of all these battles is one and the same, and that the town lay east of the Jordan.[
A more recent theory has focused on regarding this same Aphek also as the scene of the two battles against the Philistines [dubious ] mentioned by the Bible - the supposition [citation needed] being that the Syrians[dubious ] were invading Israel from the western side, which was their most vulnerable.[citation needed]
Judaean hills
Since most scholars agree that there were more than one Aphek,
References
- Douai Rheimstranslation
- ^ "The Golan Heights: A Battlefield of the Ages", Los Angeles Times, 11 September 1988
- ISBN 3110283484. Retrieved 30 December 2023.
- )
- ^ Hasegawa (2012), pp. 71-72.
- ^ The account in 1 Samuel 4:1 of the battle at Aphek and Eben-ezer
- JSTOR 42637769.
- ^ Eusebius Werke, Erich Klostermann (ed.), Leipig 1904, p. 33,24.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). "Aphek". The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.