Lo Debar

Lo Debar was a town in Gilead, east of the Jordan, remembered as the home of Machir son of Ammiel, the man who sheltered Mephibosheth after the fall of the house of Saul. It appears three times in 2 Samuel and once, with a twist on its name, in Amos.

Biblical Account

When David asked whether anyone of Saul's house remained to whom he could show kindness for the sake of Jonathan, the servant Ziba answered that Jonathan's son was in the house of Machir the son of Ammiel at Lo Debar (2 Samuel 9:4). David sent for him there and brought him to Jerusalem to eat at the king's table (2 Samuel 9:5-13). Years later, when David fled from Absalom and reached Mahanaim, Machir the son of Ammiel from Lo Debar joined Shobi son of Nahash of Rabbah and Barzillai the Gileadite of Rogelim in bringing beds, basins, earthen vessels, wheat, barley, flour, parched grain, beans, lentils, honey, curds, sheep and cheese for the king's hungry and weary company (2 Samuel 17:27-29). The household that had housed Saul's grandson thus supplied Saul's successor during Absalom's Conspiracy.

Amos, preaching against the complacency of Israel in the eighth century BC, addressed those who rejoice in Lo Debar and say, "Have we not by our own strength captured Karnaim for ourselves?" (Amos 6:13). Karnaim lay in Bashan, and both towns were probably taken during the recovery of Israel's borders under Jeroboam II (2 Kings 14:25, 28). The prophet plays on the sound of the names: Lo Debar can be heard as "no thing" and Karnaim means "horns," a figure for strength, so that Israel is boasting of having captured nothing by its own horns. Some older commentators (Keil and Delitzsch, Ellicott, the Cambridge Bible) read the phrase only as a figure of speech; many since Grätz and Wellhausen take it as a double pun on two real Transjordanian towns.

Name and Spelling

The Hebrew is written differently in each passage: the first element is spelled with a vav in 2 Samuel 9:4-5 and with an aleph in 2 Samuel 17:27 and Amos 6:13. The English Standard Version footnote to Amos 6:13 gives the meaning "nothing"; older dictionaries render it "no pasture" or "pastureless." Keil and Delitzsch judged that the Masoretes had wrongly divided a single name into two words. Many scholars connect the town with the Debir on the border of Gad, "from Mahanaim to the territory of Debir" (Joshua 13:26), where the Hebrew reads Lidebir and the Septuagint, Syriac and Vulgate read Debir. If so, Lo Debar was a Gadite town from the settlement period onward, and the Amos spelling may be a deliberate reshaping of the name into a taunt.

Geography and Identification

The text places Lo Debar in Gilead within reach of Mahanaim, north of the Jabbok River. Its site is debated. Gottlieb Schumacher proposed Ibdar, about ten kilometres east of Umm Qeis and south of the Yarmuk, on the strength of the name. Later proposals favour Khirbet Umm ed Dabar, in the eastern Jordan Valley south of the Yarmuk, or Tel Dover (Khirbet ed Duweir) at the mouth of the Yarmuk, an Iron Age settlement excavated in a rescue project by the Israel Antiquities Authority in the late 1990s and so far known mainly from preliminary reports. None of these candidates has been confirmed by an inscription, and every identification remains possible rather than established. What the candidates share is a position in northern Gilead near the Yarmuk, close to the frontier that changed hands between Israel and Damascus in the ninth and eighth centuries BC, which fits Amos's reference to a recent Israelite capture.

Historical Context

Under David (about 1010 to 970 BC) Lo Debar lay in the region from which Ishbosheth had reigned at Mahanaim (2 Samuel 2:8). By the time of Amos (about 760 to 750 BC) it was a token of Israel's recovery of Transjordan. Amos 6:14 answers the boast with a nation that will oppress Israel from Lebo Hamath to the Brook of the Arabah, and within a generation Assyria took Gilead under Tiglath-Pileser III (2 Kings 15:29).