🔼The name Thebez: Summary
- Meaning
- Brightness
- Etymology
- From a verb יבץ (yabas), to be bright.
🔼The name Thebez in the Bible
The name Thebez belongs to a town which was located near Shechem (west of the Jordan, one third of the way to the Mediterranean, and about half-way between the sea of Galilee and the Salt Sea), which is remembered for having attracted the bellicose attentions of Abimelech, son of Gideon, pseudo-judge of Israel and an unprecedented brute to boot.
Abimelech was a son of Gideon with an unnamed concubine, who first murdered his seventy half-brothers, then murdered the people of Shechem and covered the ruined town with salt to make sure it remained uninhabitable, and then crossed over to Thebez to destroy that town too.
The terrified townspeople hid in the town's tower and Abimelech was about to burn the tower down, when another unnamed woman threw a millstone down on his head and effected his well-deserved demise (Judges 9:50-57, 2 Samuel 11:21).
🔼Etymology of the name Thebez
The name Thebez appears to have been drawn from a root יבץ (ybs; in the same way that the name Tubal came from the verb יבל, yabal), but this root is otherwise unaccounted for in Biblical Hebrew. The name Thebez, nevertheless, demonstrates that this root existed, and scholars have determined that it was cognate of a known Arabic verb that means to shine or be bright.
🔼Thebez meaning
For a meaning of the name Thebez, both NOBSE Study Bible Name List and Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names read Brightness. BDB Theological Dictionary does not offer an interpretation of this name.