Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

IJON

(Heb. ʿiyôn)

A small site in the southern Beqʿa Valley, on the modern Lebanon border near Merj {Ayyûn (preserving the name; 212235), just N of Metulla on the Israel side. Most of the literary sources list Ijon together with Abel-beth-maʿacah, Dan (Laish), and Hazor in northern Israel — all border outposts between Israel and Aram-Naharaim, the Aramean states to the north.

Ijon is first mentioned in the 19th/early 18th-century b.c. Egyptian Execration Texts; later in the battle itinerary of Thutmose III on his first Asiatic campaign (ca. 1468; site no. 95 on the Karnak list); in the 14th-century Amarna Letters; and in biblical texts (1 Kgs. 15:20; 2 Chr. 16:4) as a town in Naphtali captured by Ben-hadad of Damascus. Ijon was also taken by Tiglath-pileser III ca. 733/732, during the reign of Pekah, along with Abel-beth-maʿacah (2 Kgs. 15:29), marking at that time the southern border of Aram under Assyrian rule.

Bibliography. W. G. Dever, “}Abel-Beth-Ma{acah: ‘Northern Gateway of Ancient Israel,’ ” in The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies, ed. L. T. Geraty and L. G. Herr (Berrien Springs, 1986), 207-22; H. Tadmor, “The Southern Border of Aram,” IEJ 12 (1962): 114-22.

William G. Dever

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

IJON

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)