Achor
Achor /ˈeɪkər/ (Hebrew עכור "muddy, turbid: gloomy, dejected") is the name of a valley in the vicinity of Jericho.
Eusebius (in Onomasticon) and Jerome (in Book of Sites and Names of Hebrew Places) implied that they thought it was a valley north of Jericho. In the nineteenth century some writers identified the valley with the wadi al-Qelt, a deep ravine located to Jericho's south. In the twentieth century the Hyrcania valley (El-Buqei'a in Arabic) west and south of Qumran, and Wadi en-Nu'eima have also been suggested. One difficulty is that the narrative of Joshua 7 appears to place the valley of Achor to the north of Jericho, between Jericho and Ai; but Joshua 15:7 makes the valley part of the boundary between the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin, to the south of Jericho, but not as far south as El-Buqei'a.
The Book of Joshua, chapter seven, relates the story from which the valley's name comes. After the problems the Israelites had as a result of Achan's immoral theft of items commanded to be destroyed, the Israelite community stoned Achan and his household. Liberal scholars and archaeologists regard the narrative about Achan as an aetiological myth, and instead suspect that it gained this name for another reason.
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