Gilead (tribal group)
Encyclopedia
Gilead was a tribal group mentioned in Biblical
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 passages which textual scholars
Textual criticism
Textual criticism is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts...

 attribute to early sources. In these sources, for example the Song of Deborah, the Gilead group is treated with equal status to the other Israelite tribes, while certain other tribes, including the Tribe of Manasseh
Tribe of Manasseh
According to the Hebrew Bible, the Tribe of Manasseh was one of the Tribes of Israel. Together with the Tribe of Ephraim, Manasseh also formed the House of Joseph....

, are absent. An eponym
Eponym
An eponym is the name of a person or thing, whether real or fictitious, after which a particular place, tribe, era, discovery, or other item is named or thought to be named...

ous Gilead is mentioned in the biblical genealogies as fratter a descendant of Manasseh
Manasseh (tribal patriarch)
Manasseh or Menashe was, according to the Book of Genesis, the first son of Joseph and Asenath. Asenath was an Egyptian woman whom Pharaoh gave to Joseph as wife, and the daughter of Potipherah, a priest of On. Manasseh was born in Egypt before the arrival of the children of Israel from Canaan...

, presumably implying that the Gilead group was part of Manasseh, and since Gilead is also the name of a specific part
Gilead
In the Bible "Gilead" means hill of testimony or mound of witness, , a mountainous region east of the Jordan River, situated in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It is also referred to by the Aramaic name Yegar-Sahadutha, which carries the same meaning as the Hebrew . From its mountainous character...

 of the land east of the
Transjordan (Bible)
The Transjordan is used to describe an area of land in the Southern Levant lying east of the Jordan River that is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. The area is said to form part of an ill-defined area known as the land of Israel...

 Jordan River, the Gilead tribal group presumably refers to the half tribe of Manasseh
Tribe of Manasseh
According to the Hebrew Bible, the Tribe of Manasseh was one of the Tribes of Israel. Together with the Tribe of Ephraim, Manasseh also formed the House of Joseph....

 which resided on this side of the Jordan. The identity as part of a single tribe named Manasseh, doesn't appear to have been fully accurate in practice, since there was very little geographic connection between the two half tribes, only just touching at a corner of each, and according to the Book of Chronicles each half tribe historically had always had separate tribal rulers.

How much of the half tribe the Gilead group constituted is unclear, since a tribal group named Machir
Machir (tribal group)
Machir was the name of a region mentioned in the Song of Deborah in Jud 5:14. The Song of Deborah speaks of officers coming from Machir to join the battle against Sisera....

 is given equal status to Gilead in the early biblical passages, as a separate group rather than as a group containing the Gilead group within it, and an eponymous Machir
Machir
Machir/Makir - meaning bartered - was the name of two figures in the Bible.1. Machir, the son of Manasseh, and father of Gilead....

, also descended from Manasseh, is mentioned as having conquered and also settled on the eastern side of the Jordan. The biblical genealogy of Manasseh, which textual scholars regard as dating from centuries after the passages mentioning Gilead and Machir as tribal groups, identify Machir as the immediate father of Gilead, raising the question of how this could be consistent with the earlier passages treating the Machir group as distinct from the Gilead group.
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