Aroer () is the name of two biblical cities in the Transjordan, in what is today the Kingdom of Jordan. One is Areor on the Arnon, which is located on the north bank of the River Arnon to the

east East is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from the fact that ea ...

of the

Dead Sea The Dead Sea (; or ; ), also known by #Names, other names, is a landlocked salt lake bordered by Jordan to the east, the Israeli-occupied West Bank to the west and Israel to the southwest. It lies in the endorheic basin of the Jordan Rift Valle ...

, in present-day

Jordan Jordan, officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. Jordan is bordered by Syria to the north, Iraq to the east, Saudi Arabia to the south, and Israel and the occupied Palestinian ter ...

. The town was an ancient

Moab Moab () was an ancient Levant, Levantine kingdom whose territory is today located in southern Jordan. The land is mountainous and lies alongside much of the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. The existence of the Kingdom of Moab is attested to by ...

ite settlement, and is mentioned in the Bible. Aroer is identified with the modern village of ' Ara'ir in Jordan. The second Aroer is an

Ammonite Ammonoids are extinct, (typically) coiled-shelled cephalopods comprising the subclass Ammonoidea. They are more closely related to living octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish (which comprise the clade Coleoidea) than they are to nautiluses (family N ...

town which, according to the

Book of Joshua The Book of Joshua is the sixth book in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament, and is the first book of the Deuteronomistic history, the story of Israel from the conquest of Canaan to the Babylonian captivity, Babylonian exile. It tells of the ...

, was located on the border between the

Israelite Israelites were a Hebrew language, Hebrew-speaking ethnoreligious group, consisting of tribes that lived in Canaan during the Iron Age. Modern scholarship describes the Israelites as emerging from indigenous Canaanites, Canaanite populations ...

Tribe of Gad and the kingdom of Ammon. However, its precise location has been lost to history.

Aroer on the Arnon

Location

Henry Baker Tristram Henry Baker Tristram FRS (11 May 1822 – 8 March 1906) was an English clergyman, Bible scholar, traveller and ornithologist. As a parson-naturalist he was an early, but short-lived, supporter of Darwinism, attempting to reconcile evolution an ...

suggested that "Aroer, which is on the edge of the valley of Arnon" () is the place of modern 'Ara'ir on the north bank of the Wadi Mujib ravine, the biblical Arnon stream, about from the mouth of the river. The city was still standing in the time of

Eusebius Eusebius of Caesarea (30 May AD 339), also known as Eusebius Pamphilius, was a historian of Christianity, exegete, and Christian polemicist from the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. In about AD 314 he became the bishop of Caesarea Maritima. ...

. This place was usually described by its situation, in order to distinguish it from other localities of the same name.

Biblical mentions

It appears first as having been captured from

by the

Amorite The Amorites () were an ancient Northwest Semitic-speaking Bronze Age people from the Levant. Initially appearing in Sumerian records c. 2500 BC, they expanded and ruled most of the Levant, Mesopotamia and parts of Egypt from the 21st century BC ...

king Sihon. After the

attack on the

Amorites The Amorites () were an ancient Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic-speaking Bronze Age people from the Levant. Initially appearing in Sumerian records c. 2500 BC, they expanded and ruled most of the Levant, Mesopotamia and parts of Eg ...

, it was assigned as part of the territory of the tribe of

Reuben Reuben or Reuven is a Biblical male first name from Hebrew רְאוּבֵן (Re'uven), meaning "behold, a son". In the Bible, Reuben was the firstborn son of Jacob. Variants include Reuvein in Yiddish or as an English variant spelling on th ...

, whose southern frontier it marked. This is the city mentioned in , with the southern towns, as having been built by the Tribe of Gad before the Tribal allotments of Israel. When

Hazael Hazael (; ; Old Aramaic 𐤇𐤆𐤀𐤋 ''Ḥzʔl'') was a king of Aram-Damascus mentioned in the Bible. Under his reign, Aram-Damascus became an empire that ruled over large parts of contemporary Syria and Israel-Samaria. While he was likely ...

Aram Damascus Aram-Damascus ( ) was an Aramean polity that existed from the late-12th century BCE until 732 BCE, and was centred around the city of Damascus in the Southern Levant. Alongside various tribal lands, it was bounded in its later years by the po ...

took the Transjordan territory from the Kingdom of Israel, Aroer is given as its southern limit. It is clear, from , that the Moabites ultimately recovered it from Israel. In , an Adadah is mentioned. According to Cheyne and Black, arguing partially on the basis of a

Septuagint The Septuagint ( ), sometimes referred to as the Greek Old Testament or The Translation of the Seventy (), and abbreviated as LXX, is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Biblical Hebrew. The full Greek ...

reading of ''Arouel,'' this Adadah may in fact be the result of a scribal error, with the text originally reading ''Ararah'', meaning Aroer. According to a

prophecy In religion, mythology, and fiction, a prophecy is a message that has been communicated to a person (typically called a ''prophet'') by a supernatural entity. Prophecies are a feature of many cultures and belief systems and usually contain di ...

in the

Book of Isaiah The Book of Isaiah ( ) is the first of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the first of the Major Prophets in the Christian Old Testament. It is identified by a superscription as the words of the 8th-century BC prophet Isaiah ben Amo ...

, "the cities of Aroer" will become forsaken; however, the Septuagint relates this verse to

Damascus Damascus ( , ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in the Levant region by population, largest city of Syria. It is the oldest capital in the world and, according to some, the fourth Holiest sites in Islam, holiest city in Islam. Kno ...

in Syria, translating as "deserted for ever" (see Isaiah 17:2).Benson Commentary
on Isaiah 17, accessed 31 March 2018

Extra-biblical mention

In the Mesha inscription, line 26, it is mentioned as having been built by the Moabites.

References and sources

;References ;Sources
Aroer, Jewish Encyclopædia

External links

Photos of Ara'ir
at the American Center of Research {{coord, 31.4672, N, 35.5633, E, source:wikidata, display=title Moab Torah cities