Bedan ( ''Bəḏān'') is named as one of the deliverer of

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 ...

s in 1

Samuel Samuel is a figure who, in the narratives of the Hebrew Bible, plays a key role in the transition from the biblical judges to the United Kingdom of Israel under Saul, and again in the monarchy's transition from Saul to David. He is venera ...

12:11. He is not mentioned elsewhere as a judge of Israel.BibleGateway – Quick search: Bedan
/ref> Bishop Simon Patrick and others (including the

Talmud The Talmud (; ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (''halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of Haskalah#Effects, modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the cen ...

) posit the name to be a contraction of ''ben Dan'' ("the son of Dan") by which they suppose

Samson SAMSON (Software for Adaptive Modeling and Simulation Of Nanosystems) is a computer software platform for molecular design being developed bOneAngstromand previously by the NANO-D group at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science an ...

is meant, as the

Targum A targum (, ''interpretation'', ''translation'', ''version''; plural: targumim) was an originally spoken translation of the Hebrew Bible (also called the ) that a professional translator ( ''mǝṯurgǝmān'') would give in the common language o ...

reads. The

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 ...

, Syriac, and

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

, however, refer to the name as

Barak Barak ( or ; ; Tiberian Hebrew: '' Bārāq''; "lightning") was a ruler of Ancient Israel. As military commander in the biblical Book of Judges, Barak, with Deborah, from the Tribe of Ephraim, the prophet and fourth Judge of pre-monarchic Israe ...

, instead of Bedan; and the two latter versions list in that verse Samson as the last deliverer of the Israelites, instead of

. These readings are adopted by Charles François Houbigant, and appear to be genuine, for it is not probable that Samuel would enumerate himself. The letters forming Bedan (בדן) Barak (ברק) in the Hebrew are very similar, and a scribe might easily have written the one for the other, and the mistake might well have been perpetuated. Others contend that this is no mistake, but that Bedan (B'dan) is simply a variant or contracted form of the name Abdon. Bedan is the name of a descendant of

Manasseh Manasseh () is both a given name and a surname. Its variants include Manasses and Manasse. Notable people with the name include: Surname * Ezekiel Saleh Manasseh (died 1944), Singaporean rice and opium merchant and hotelier * Jacob Manasseh ( ...

in 1 Chronicles 7:17 1 Chronicices 7:17
/ref>

References

Books of Samuel people {{Tanakh-stub