ELEPH is the rendering in the A. V. and the Vulgate of rit..?,;1, the name (with its prepositive art.) of one of the second group of cities which fell within the tribe of Benjamin ; it occurs in Josh. xviii. 23. The LXX. version unites the preceding 3hv (Zela) with this name of Eleph, under the corn pound form Z7/XaN40.* But in that case there would be one wanting in the fourteen .1. cities assigned to this group. From the occasional use of in the bucolic sense of ox,' it has been conjectured that Eleph and its villages' was a pastoral district. The extremely frequent numerical sense, however, of a thousand, points rather to the populous ness of these towns which lay in the neighbourhood of Jebus or Jerusalem. Schultens (Prov. Solent.
17), refers to the Arabic conjunct/a, in illustration of both the numerical and the domestic sense of the Hebrew root. (See further Meier, Heir. W. w. b. p. 379). Simon, in his Onomasticon (p. 141), refers to the name of the Cilician town MuptavSpor in illustration, and to Deut. i. 11, Ps.
xci. 7, etc., for an indefinite use of to desig nate a great multitude. Fiirst, in his Hebrdisches Wei terb. (i. 91, 98), finds in Zech. ix. 7 another mention of our town Eleph, under the form or ; which, like 7ebusi, he makes a frontier city belonging to Benjamin and Judah. He quotes
from jephet (or 7efet ben Ali), a Jewish commen tator who lived at Jerusalem in the loth century, a statement that the words of Josh. xviii. 28, 1/9y, are in fact the designation of but a single city—or still less, apparently, than even that, for he further quotes Jefet as saying that in his time a ward of Jerusalem bore that aggregate name, in which was the sepulchre of Zechariah. We reject this view as not only doing violence to the distinct enumeration of the group of cities given in Josh. xviii. 23, but as disturbing the sense of the passage in Zech. ix. 7 (see Hengstenberg, Christol.
iii. [Clark] 392-394). The phrase rrpro4 (tribe-prince in yuclah), used by the prophet in this passage, is by him repeated twice (see Zech. xii. 5, 6). In the Pentateuch and 1 Chron. the same noun, in the plural, designates the chieftains or ' dukes' of Edom.
For some valuable remarks on the phrase, as indicating the genuineness of the passages in Zecha riah, see also Hengstenberg, iv. 67, note. No modern traveller has identified the site of Eleph. P. II.