Bible Strands
Nehemiah 11:25
As for the villages with their fields, some of the people of Judah lived in Kiriath-arba, Dibon, Jekabzeel, and their villages;
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — The narrator documents the post-exilic redistribution of Judah’s population into designated territories. This record follows the administrative appointment of Pethahiah as the royal agent overseeing the people’s affairs.
The words — חֲצֵרִים (cha.tze.Rim) denotes "villages" or enclosed farmsteads, while יָשְׁבוּ (ya.she.Vu) means "they dwelt" or "they settled." These terms specify the permanent relocation of Judah’s descendants to the listed agricultural sites.
The thread — Kiriath-arba is identified in Joshua 14:15 as the former name of Hebron, and Jekabzeel appears in Joshua 15:21 as a southern border city. The verse continues the tribal inheritance lists by applying ancient territorial designations to the returning exiles.
Why it lands — The text requires the reader to observe how communal survival depended on the systematic reoccupation of ancestral land. It presents territorial allocation not as a spiritual metaphor but as a concrete administrative act.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
And for the villages, with their fields, some of the children of Judah dwelt at Kirjath–arba, and in the villages thereof, and at Dibon, and in the villages thereof, and at Jekabzeel, and in the villages thereof,
Cross-references
- Joshua 14:15 (Hebron used to be called Kiriath-arba, after Arba, the greatest man among the Anakim.) Then the land had rest from war.
- Joshua 15:21 These were the southernmost cities of the tribe of Judah in the Negev toward the border of Edom: Kabzeel, Eder, Jagur,