place · also Eshtaolite
Eshtaol
אֶשְׁתָּאוֹל
- verses
- 8
- first named
- Joshua 15:33
- last named
- 1 Chronicles 2:53
- feature
- settlement
- coordinates
- 31.80°N · 34.99°E
Khirbet Deir Shubeib (OpenBible)
Scholarship offers 5 identifications for this place. The leading one is shown; the others are recorded in the gazetteer.
Description
Eshtaol in the text
Eshtaol was a city located in the Shephelah, or foothills, of Judah. It was initially allotted to the tribe of Judah (Joshua 15:33) but was later assigned to the tribe of Dan (Joshua 19:41).
Eshtaol is particularly associated with the story of Samson, the legendary Israelite judge. Samson was born in the nearby town of Zorah and is described as moving between Zorah and Eshtaol, where the Spirit of the Lord began to stir him (Judges 13:25). After Samson's death, he was buried between Zorah and Eshtaol in the tomb of his father, Manoah (Judges 16:31).
Eshtaol also played a role in the Danite migration narrative. Due to limited territory and pressure from the Philistines, a group of Danites sent spies from Zorah and Eshtaol to search for a new land to settle (Judges 18:2). After the spies returned with a favorable report, six hundred men from the clan of the Danites set out from Zorah and Eshtaol to conquer the city of Laish in the north (Judges 18:8, 11).
The descendants of the Eshtaolites, a clan from Eshtaol, are mentioned in 1Ch.2.53 among the descendants of Judah's son Shobal. This suggests that the city maintained its ties to the tribe of Judah even after being allotted to Dan.
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
- Zorah4 events
- Samson2 events
- Six Hundred Danites1 event
- Five Danite Men1 event
- Mahaneh-dan1 event
The pattern
Where Eshtaol 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.
8 verses across 3 of 66 books; 63 write the name nowhere. Named in Joshua (2), Judges (5) and 1 Chronicles (1).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — 8, across 3 books.
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.
Where they appear
What happened here
Atlas's reading of each chapter this place appears in, in canonical order. One line per chapter, and each leads to the whole of it.
Sources