Ephraim

The name of a person, a tribe, a territory, as well as two minor locations in the Bible.

1. The second son of Joseph by Asenath, daughter of Potiphera, priest of On. His name, derived from Hebrew para, means "being fruitful," so named because he was born at a time when Joseph was riding high in Pharaoh's government and "God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering" (Gen 41:52). Ephraim and his brother Manasseh, were adopted by Jacob as his own and made equal with Reuben and Simeon, though in doing so, Jacob also reversed the order of their birthrights (Gen 48:5; 14). We hear little of Ephaim as a person in the Bible.

2. The tribe of Ephraim had their inheritance allotted to them in Canaan centrally sandwiched between Manasseh in the north, Benjamin in the east, and Judah to the south.

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From its early days the Ephraimites were passionately involved in the life of the nation; they are, e.g., mentioned more often than any other tribe in the book of Judges. On two occasions they felt slighted that they were not consulted or invited early enough to participate in the wars of Israel led by leaders from other tribes. Gideon managed to appease them enough without serious consequences (Judg 8:1-3). The one with Jephthah's fight against the Ammonites, however, led to open war between them and the death of 42,000 Ephraimites alone (Judg 12). It was an Ephraimite, Jeroboam son of Nebat, who rebelled against Solomon (1 Ki 11:26), who later initiated the schism that established the nothern tribes as a nation, Israel, of their own (1 Ki 12). His founding of the two centers of idol worship at Dan and Bethel would lead the nation down the road to their eventual and permanent exile under the Assyrians in the late 8th Cent BC. If Jeroboam ben Nebet sealed the nation as a rebel against Yahweh, he did not initiate it for, from its early days, Ephraim was well known for its idol worship, as witnessed in the story of Micah's idol in Judg 17. Especially in the book of Hosea, the name Ephraim, used as a synonym for Israel, almost always connoted idolatry and rebellion against God (see, e.g., Hos 4:17; 5:5; 7:1).

Good things, however, did come from Ephraim. Deborah, one of the first women to distinguish herself as a leader, was probably of the tribe (Judg 4:5).

The territory occupied by the tribe of Ephraim was often referred to as the "hill country of Ephraim," har-'efrayim (see, e.g., Jos 19:50; 20:7; Judg 3:27; 4:5; 1 Sam 9:4; 14:22; 1 Ki 4:8). The incidental remark by Joshua in Jos 17:17-18, suggests that at the time, this territory was densely wooded, while Jer 31:5 that it was rich in vineyards.

3. A location known only from the expression "forest of Ephraim" in 2 Sam 18:6, where David's army faced off the army of his rebelling son Absalom, and near where Absalom died, killed by Joab, while stuck in an oak tree. The context—David crossing the Jordon and getting to Mahanaim, and the Israelites and Absalom camping in the land of Gilead (2 Sam 17:22, 24, 26)—points clearly to a location in Gilead, east of the Jordan. Nothing else is known about the location.

4. A village mentioned in Jn 11:45 to which Jesus withdrew, with his disciples, for a while when the Jewish leaders began a plot on his life. Nothing is otherwise known about the place.