person
Zelophehad
צְלׇפְחָד
Zelophehad, a descendant of Manasseh, had no sons, so his daughters appealed for and received his inheritance.
- verses
- 9
- first named
- Numbers 26:33
- last named
- 1 Chronicles 7:15
- period
- Egypt and Wilderness
- tribe
- Manasseh
Description
Who was Zelophehad?
Zelophehad was a man from the tribe of Manasseh during the time of Moses. He had five daughters - Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah - but no sons. After the census in the wilderness, Zelophehad's daughters came before Moses, Eleazar the priest, the leaders, and the congregation, asking for a possession among their father's brothers, since Zelophehad had died without a male heir. Moses brought their case before the Lord, who commanded that the daughters be given their father's inheritance. This ruling set a precedent for cases where a man died without a son. Later, when the Israelites were preparing to enter Canaan, the heads of the fathers' houses of Manasseh raised a concern that if Zelophehad's daughters married outside their tribe, their inheritance would be lost to the tribe. Moses then commanded that they could marry whom they thought best, but only within their father's tribal clan, to keep the inheritance within the tribe. Zelophehad's daughters did as the Lord commanded and married sons of their father's brothers. This event is significant in establishing the rights of inheritance for women in ancient Israel.
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.
Child of
Father of
- HoglahregistryNumbers 26:33Joshua 17:3
- MahlahregistryNumbers 26:33Joshua 17:3
- MilcahregistryNumbers 26:33Joshua 17:3
- NoahregistryNumbers 26:33Joshua 17:3
- TirzahregistryNumbers 26:33Joshua 17:3
Parent of
Stands in the same events as
- Sinai Wilderness1 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 Zelophehad 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.
9 verses across 3 of 66 books; 63 write the name nowhere. Named in Numbers (7), Joshua (1) and 1 Chronicles (1).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — 9, across 3 books. The name is written 11 times in them.
Onward
Where this page goes
Not the direct relations above — these are one hop further out, ranked so that a rare shared connection outweighs a common one. Descriptions by STEPBible TIPNR.
Where they appear
Chapter by chapter
Atlas's reading of each chapter this person appears in, in canonical order. One line per chapter, and each leads to the whole of it.
Sources