Big City, Small Town—Why Size Matters

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With rare exceptions, biblical Hebrew utilizes exactly one word, ‘ir, to reference permanent settlements—everything from tiny villages to giant metropolises. This versatility leads to its frequent use in the Hebrew Bible, where ‘ir appears some 1,093 times. Its broad range of meaning gives us multiple translation options, including “city,” “town,” and “village.” English translations usually render it as “city,” with “town” appearing much less often, and “village” used rarely or not at all. This is not best practice! As we will see, many ‘arim (plural of ‘ir) were villages, not cities or towns, and most other Israelite settlements were in […]

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Endnotes

1. For the differences between cities and villages in the ancient Near East, see Greg Woolf, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2020), pp. 3–13. For a similar discussion of sites in ancient Israel, see Avraham Faust, “Cities, Villages, and Towns, Bronze and Iron Age,” in Daniel M. Master, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), pp. 203–211.

2. Archaeologists begin population estimates at 100 people per acre, then adjust for site-specific architecture, topological features, and other factors. See William G. Dever, The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), p. 105.