place · also Bethany · Bethabara
Beth-barah
בֵּית בָּרָהΒηθανία
- verses
- 2
- first named
- Judges 7:24
- last named
- Judges 7:24
- feature
- ford
- coordinates
- 31.84°N · 35.55°E
Al Maghtas (OpenBible)
Scholarship offers 2 identifications for this place. The leading one is shown; the others are recorded in the gazetteer.
Description
Beth-barah in the text
Beth-barah, also known as Bethabara, is mentioned in two different contexts in the Bible. In Judges 7:24, during Gideon's battle against the Midianites, he sent messengers throughout the hill country of Ephraim, asking the Ephraimites to intercept the fleeing Midianites at the waters of Beth-barah and the Jordan. The Ephraimites captured and killed the two Midianite princes, Oreb and Zeeb.
In Jhn.1.28, Bethabara is mentioned as the place where John the Baptist was baptizing people. This Bethabara is described as being "beyond the Jordan," indicating that it was on the eastern side of the Jordan River. Some manuscripts mention "Bethany" instead of "Bethabara" in this verse, which has led to some confusion. However, the Bethany mentioned here is not the same as the village near Jerusalem associated with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.
The exact location of Beth-barah/Bethabara is uncertain, but it was likely a ford or crossing point along the Jordan River, possibly in the vicinity of the Jabbok River. The name Beth-barah means "house of the crossing" or "house of the ford" in Hebrew, which supports this interpretation.
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
- Seizing1 event
The pattern
Where Beth-barah 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.
2 verses across 2 of 66 books; 64 write the name nowhere. Named in Judges (1) and John (1).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — 2, across 2 books. The name is written 4 times in them.
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