Golan

Golan was a city in Bashan, the northernmost of the three cities of refuge east of the Jordan and a Levitical city in the territory of the half-tribe of Manasseh. It is named four times in the Old Testament, always with the qualifier "in Bashan" (Deuteronomy 4:43; Joshua 20:8; 21:27; 1 Chronicles 6:71). The name, in Hebrew Golan, has been connected with a root meaning "circle" or "round," and in the Greek and Roman periods it passed from the town to the surrounding district, Gaulanitis, from which the modern Golan Heights take their name.

Biblical Account

Moses set apart three cities east of the Jordan for the manslayer who killed a neighbor unintentionally, "without being at enmity with him in time past": Bezer in the wilderness on the tableland for the Reubenites, Ramoth in Gilead for the Gadites, and Golan in Bashan for the Manassites (Deuteronomy 4:41-43). After the conquest Joshua confirmed the same three, together with Kedesh, Shechem and Hebron west of the river, as cities "for all the people of Israel and for the stranger sojourning among them," where a man who killed without intent could flee from the avenger of blood until he stood before the congregation (Joshua 20:7-9). In the allotment of Levitical towns, Golan in Bashan with its pasturelands, "the city of refuge for the manslayer," and Beeshterah were given out of the half-tribe of Manasseh to the Gershonites, one of the clans of the Levites (Joshua 21:27). The Chronicler's parallel list names the two towns of the sons of Gershom as Golan in Bashan and Ashtaroth (1 Chronicles 6:71), so Beeshterah and Ashtaroth are taken to be the same place, the old royal city of Og king of Bashan. Golan is not mentioned again in the biblical record; no narrative event is set there.

Geography and Identification

Bashan is the basalt country east of the Sea of Galilee; its western plateau, the Jaulan, is bounded by Mount Hermon on the north and the Yarmuk on the south, and Golan lay somewhere within this region. The site is not securely known, and this identification is debated among biblical archaeologists. Eusebius, writing in the early fourth century AD, described Gaulon or Golan as a large village that had given its name to the adjoining country. The American-born engineer and surveyor Gottlieb Schumacher, raised in the German Templer colony at Haifa, whose survey of the Jaulan in the 1880s was published by the Palestine Exploration Fund, proposed the village of Sahm el-Jaulan, a few miles east of the Nahr el-Allan, the stream usually taken as the eastern boundary of Gaulanitis, so just beyond the plateau's edge on the Hauran plain, in what is now Syria's Daraa Governorate. Most reference works still list Sahm el-Jaulan as the probable site, and Byzantine remains are reported there, but the identification rests on the survival of the name rather than on excavated evidence, and Bronze and Iron Age remains have not been found at the village. Dan Urman raised this objection, and an alternative location near the Hula Valley has also been suggested. W. F. Albright held that the biblical city lay within the present Golan, while some have placed it further north toward Maacah. Sahm el-Jaulan is therefore a possible identification, not an established one. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes a possible earlier mention of the town as Giluni in the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BC, but that reading is not certain.

Historical Context

The three eastern cities of refuge were spaced along the length of Israel's Transjordan holdings, Bezer in the south, Ramoth-gilead in the center and Golan in the north, so that no manslayer in Reuben, Gad or eastern Manasseh was far from sanctuary. Its pairing with Ashtaroth in the Gershonite allotment places Golan in the heartland of Og's former kingdom, the region Israel took under Moses about 1406 BC. The town is silent through the monarchy, when Bashan passed back and forth between Israel and Aram Damascus. Josephus is the first writer to use the name for both a town and a district. He records that Alexander Jannaeus, the Hasmonean king (103 to 76 BC), was ambushed by the Arab king Obedas and lost his army at a village that the manuscripts of Josephus locate variously in Gilead or in Gaulane (Antiquities 13.375), and that he later took Golan itself along with Seleucia (Antiquities 13.393); after Herod's death in 4 BC Gaulanitis fell within the tetrarchy of his son Philip.

Theological Significance

Golan's whole biblical identity is bound to the law of asylum. A city of refuge was at once a Levitical town, so that the fugitive lived among those who taught the law, and a place of judgment, since he was protected only "till he stood before the congregation" (Joshua 20:9). The provision distinguished bloodguilt from accident, restrained the avenger of blood, and kept the land from being defiled by the shedding of innocent blood, and it did so at the farthest edge of Israel's inheritance as much as at its center.