One of the challenging tasks for archaeologists and biblical historians alike is the identification of sites mentioned in the Bible—some of which were destroyed and disappeared in time without a trace. The first comprehensive attempt to locate these sites was that of Eusebius, the fourth-century church historian (ca. 265-339 A.D.). In his Onomasticon Eusebius cataloged all of the cities and regions mentioned in the Old Testament and the Gospels.[1] Supplementing this list when possible, Eusebius provided detailed information concerning their locations, including their distances in Roman miles from other well-known cities and villages.
Although the scale of Eusebius’ compilation is impressive, the work’s most glaring failure is the historian’s unfamiliarity with the Hebrew of the Old Testament. On occasion he mistakes a Hebrew adverb, adjective or obscure noun for a proper name. In so doing, he (and/or the Greek translations he used) invented places that never existed. At other times, the brevity of his descriptions—with nothing more than details taken from the Bible itself and no additional information about the site—suggests that the location of the site was already lost by the beginning of the fourth century.
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- [1] R. Steven Notley and Ze’ev Safrai, Eusebius, Onomasticon: A Triglott Edition with Notes and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2005). ↩
