Tob

Tob was a land east of the Jordan, north of Ammon on the edge of the Bashan steppe, remembered as the place where Jephthah lived in exile before the elders of Gilead recalled him to lead them against the Ammonites. Its name is the Hebrew word for "good", and the modern Arabic village name et-Taiyibeh, which carries the same meaning, underlies the leading proposals for its location.

Biblical Account

The book of Judges records that Jephthah, driven from his father's house by his half-brothers because he was the son of a prostitute, "fled from his brothers and lived in the land of Tob, and worthless fellows collected around Jephthah and went out with him" (Judges 11:3). When the Ammonites made war on Israel, "the elders of Gilead went to bring Jephthah from the land of Tob" (Judges 11:5), offered him command, and after he set his terms swore before the Lord that he would be their head (Judges 11:6-11). Tob therefore lay outside the elders' authority but within a delegation's reach of Gilead. On the house chronology this took place about 1100 BC.

Tob appears once more in the reign of David. When the Ammonites had insulted David's envoys, Hanun and his people hired allies: the Syrians of Beth-Rehob and of Zobah with 20,000 foot soldiers, the king of Maacah with 1,000 men, "and the men of Tob, 12,000 men" (2 Samuel 10:6). When Joab arrived, the Ammonites stood at the gate of their city while "the Syrians of Zobah and of Rehob and the men of Tob and Maacah were by themselves in the open country" (2 Samuel 10:8). The Hebrew phrase behind "men of Tob" is Ish-tob, which the King James Version renders as a proper name. The parallel account in 1 Chronicles 19:6-7 names Mesopotamia, Aram-maacah and Zobah as the hired powers and does not mention Tob.

Geography and Identification

The biblical notices place Tob beyond Gilead toward the north or east, among the Aramean states that bordered Ammon. Two candidate sites, both named et-Taiyibeh, have been proposed. G. A. Smith favoured the et-Taiyibeh about 10 miles south of Umm Qeis (ancient Gadara), in the hills southeast of the Sea of Galilee in northern Jordan, and the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia called this perhaps the most likely identification. More recent geographers, following Benjamin Mazar and Martin Noth, prefer the Syrian village of et-Taiyibeh east of Der'a (biblical Edrei) in the upper Yarmuk basin, on the desert fringe between Der'a and the Hauran Bozrah (Busra esh-Sham), which suits a state counted with the Bashan cities in Egyptian records and the picture in Judges 11 of an outlying refuge. A Talmudic notice led older writers to place Tob in the district of Hippene east of the Sea of Galilee. This identification is debated among biblical archaeologists, and both proposals rest on the survival of the name rather than on excavated evidence. It is best rated possible.

Historical Context

A town called Tubu is named in the Amarna Letters of about 1350 BC; letter EA 205 was sent by its ruler, and the tablet belongs to the group of letters from Bashan. A name that appears to be the same town stands in the topographical list of Thutmose III, seemingly grouped with Bashan towns such as Ashtaroth. If these readings are right, Tob was a small city-state in the Late Bronze Age, three centuries or more before Jephthah sheltered there, and it was still able to field a contingent of its own in David's day, about 1000 BC. In 1 Maccabees 5:13 a report reaches Judas Maccabeus that the Jews "in the land of Tob" had been killed and their families carried off; if the Greek phrase refers to the land of Tob rather than to the Tobiad family, as some versions take it, this points to a Jewish settlement in the district in the second century BC.

Theological Significance

Tob is the setting of the reversal in Jephthah's story. The outcast whom Gilead expelled became the leader Gilead had to seek out, and the negotiations that began in Tob ended with his words spoken "before the Lord at Mizpah" (Judges 11:11). In David's reign the same land supplied soldiers against Israel, and the coalition's defeat by Joab and David belongs to the sequence of campaigns in which "the Lord gave victory to David wherever he went" (2 Samuel 8:14).