Ed is the name of an altar, or the place where an altar is located, according to some English translations of the Bible. In the biblical account (Joshua 22:34), the altar in question is said to have been built by the tribes east of the Jordan; this construction supposedly concerned the other tribes who felt that there should only be one altar, but the eastern tribes are said to have built it only as a testimony to their faith, and not as a working altar. The eastern tribes named the altar appropriately to fit this, and Ed means witness in Hebrew. Look up Altar in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The efforts of translating the Bible from its original languages into over 2,000 others have spanned more than two millennia. ... Hebrew redirects here. ...

However, the original text does not actually name the altar Ed, the name of the altar is not actually mentioned at all by either the masoretic text or the Septuagint. As other translations acknowledge, the text is corrupted at this point and reads only ... [they] named the altar, because ... witness ..., leading textual scholars to suspect that the name of the altar must have been dropped by a copyist, either deliberately (due to it perhaps being inconvenient) or unintentionally. Dillmann ^[1] suggests Gal-'ed, i.e. Galeed, as in Genesis 31:47 which describes a location at which a mound of stones was built to be a witness to a pact between Jacob and Laban; should this be the case, there would be two conflicting explanations given for the name of Galeed, perhaps explaining why in one of the explanations a scribe accidentally failed to copy the name itself. The Masoretic Text (MT) is the Hebrew text of the Tanakh approved for general use in Judaism. ... The Septuagint: A page from Codex vaticanus, the basis of Sir Launcelot Lee Brentons English translation. ... Textual criticism or lower criticism is a branch of philology or bibliography that is concerned with the identification and removal of errors from texts. ... Jacob or Yaakov, (Hebrew: יַעֲקֹב, Standard  Tiberian ; Arabic: يعقوب, ; holds the heel), also known as Israel (Hebrew: יִשְׂרָאֵל, Standard  Tiberian ; Arabic: اسرائيل, ; Struggled with God), is the third Biblical patriarch. ... Laban is: A character in the Bible. ...

According to the biblical narrative, the naming happened once Joshua had completed the conquest of canaan, and the eastern tribes and western tribes parted ways to take possession of the territories respectively assigned to them. Since a growing majority of archaeologists believe that the conquest never happened, and that the Israelites simply emerged from a subculture within Canaanite society, most critical scholars view the earlier narrative (the one involving Jacob and Laban) to be more accurate an explanation for Galeed and the stone construction that was there, with the author of Joshua having taken an earlier tradition about the placename and worked it into the conquest narrative ^[2]. Joshua or Yehoshua (Hebrew: יְהוֹשֻׁעַ, Tiberian: , Israeli: YÉ™hoshúa) was an Israelite leader who succeeded Moses. ... Archaeology or sometimes in American English archeology (from the Greek words αρχαίος = ancient and λόγος = word/speech) is the study of human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains, including architecture, artefacts, biofacts, human remains, and landscapes. ...

As ordinarily translated, the narrative explains the name of the altar (whatever it was) as a witness to the position that Yahweh is God (sometimes rendered The Lord is God); however, it is also accurate to translate the position as explaining that Yahweh is El. This latter rendering, if it was the original intent, is suggestive that the narrative was written at a time when some groups believed that Yahweh and El were distinct, as hinted at in some of the older Psalms, particularly Psalm 82 (in which El is portrayed as chairing an assembly of deities, and assigning Yahweh to the Israelites). It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Tetragrammaton. ... Ēl (אל) is a northwest Semitic word and name translated into English as either god or God or left untranslated as El, depending on the context. ... Psalms (Hebrew: Tehilim, תהילים) is a book of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh. ...

1. ^ Dillman Joshua ad loc
2. ^ Israel Finkelstein, The Bible Unearthed

Israel Finkelstein Israel Finkelstein is an Israeli archaeologist. ... The Bible Unearthed: Archaeologys New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts is a controversial book about the origin of the Bible. ...

References

• This article incorporates text from the 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, a publication now in the public domain.