TABEEL. - With the name "son of T." there is indicated, with a deliberately somewhat mysterious allusion, in Is. 7:6, a personage whom the king of Damascus Rezin and the king of Samaria Pekah (Pegah) wished to substitute for the king of Jerusalem, Ahaz, as punishment for his refusal to join the anti-Assyrian league that they had planned.

The two allies attempted to carry out their plan and to reach Jerusalem and besiege it, but they were diverted from it by the arrival of Tiglath-Pileser III, who in that expedition definitively brought down the Kingdom of Damascus (732).

It is not known who T. is nor his son; not even the pronunciation of the name is certain, which in the Masoretic text is vocalized Ṭābhē'al: the first element ṭābh

"good" in Hebrew should rather be ṭābh (with Aramaizing ā; the individual designated was an Aramean, from Damascus?). The second element would be -'al in the Jewish-Masoretic tradition by allusion to the particle -'al, "no, nothing" (= "good for nothing"), but in reality it would be -'el as in the versions. In Hebrew the name should be Ṭōbh'ēl, or Ṭōbhī'ēl; cf. Assyrian Ṭāb-ilu.

The same name was borne by a Samaritan official mentioned in Ezra 4:7 (where the Hebrew also has Ṭābhē'ēl).

Giovanni Rinaldi

@incollection{ec11_tabeel, author = {Rinaldi, Giovanni}, title = {Tabeel}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {XI}, pages = {1676--1677}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1953}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/tabeel} }

One of some 20,000 entries brought back from the twelve printed volumes (1948–54). Spotted something? Help us improve it.

About this entry