person
Bishlam
בִּשְׁלָם
Bishlam was a Samaritan official who, along with others, wrote to King Artaxerxes to oppose the rebuilding of Jerusalem.
- verses
- 1
- first named
- Ezra 4:7
- last named
- Ezra 4:7
- period
- Exile and Return
- role
- Man
Description
Who was Bishlam?
Bishlam was a Samaritan official who, together with Tabeel and the rest of their associates, wrote a letter to King Artaxerxes of Persia to oppose the rebuilding of Jerusalem (Ezr. 4:7). This letter was written in Aramaic and translated, indicating that it was an official document. The Samaritans, who were the inhabitants of the region north of Judah, were adversaries of the Jews and sought to undermine their efforts to rebuild the city and the temple. In their letter, they accused the Jews of rebuilding a rebellious and wicked city, warning the king that if the city were rebuilt, the Jews would no longer pay taxes and would damage the king's revenues (Ezr. 4:12-13). As a result of this letter, the king ordered the work on the city to cease until further notice (Ezr. 4:21-22). Bishlam's actions demonstrate the political opposition and challenges faced by the Jews as they sought to restore their homeland after the Babylonian exile.
Relations
Direct connections
Every entity the graph places in a stated relation with this one, grouped by the kind of link. Each relation is authored once and its inverse derived, so both ends always agree. Rows marked “registry” come from the identity spine rather than from a verse, and a row marked “which bearer is the source’s decision” is one where the name could have meant more than one person. The last group is not a relation at all — it counts the events two entities stand in together.
Stands in the same events as
- Jerusalem1 event
- Artaxerxes1 event
- Rehum1 event
- Rest Of Associates1 event
- Shimshai1 event
- Mithredath1 event
- Tabeel1 event
Places
Where this happens
A person is placed by the events they take part in, and an event has to clear three things to place them: it must say where it happened, that place must be one the gazetteer can put a coordinate on, and the verse must report it rather than foretell, command or ask it. Nothing anchored here clears all three. Where the text names a setting no gazetteer surveys — a vineyard, a palace, a plot of ground — it is left off rather than guessed at; where a place is named only in a prophecy, the map does not draw what was said to be coming as though it had happened; and a place reached only through a relation is not inherited, because standing beside somebody is not being somewhere.
No verse Atlas has read as a report puts this person anywhere.
Not read yet
The pattern
Where Bishlam is named
Every book of the corpus in the order it is read, each as wide as the chapters it holds. A bar is the verses of that book which write the name, and the flat stretches are as much of the answer as the bars.
1 verse across 1 of 66 books; 65 write the name nowhere. Named in Ezra (1).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — one, across 1 book.
Onward
Where this page goes
Nothing in the graph stands one hop from this entity yet. These are the best-connected entities of the same type, so the page still ends somewhere. Descriptions by STEPBible TIPNR.
Sources