ellauri431.html on line 104: The tribe of Ephraim complained to Jephthah that he had not asked them to help him against the Ammonites, and they threatened to burn down his house. Jephthah replied that he had summoned them, but they had not reacted. Jephthah gathered an army of Gileadites and defeated the Ephraimites.
ellauri431.html on line 106: The Ephraimites tried to escape by crossing the river. The Gileadites, who controlled the approaches to the Jordan River, asked each one of the survivors if he was an Ephraimite.
ellauri431.html on line 108: If the man denied it, he was asked to say the word Shibboleth, a word that the Ephraimites pronounced as “Sibboleth.” If the man didn’t pronounce the word correctly, the Gileadites killed him. Approximately 42,000 Ephraimites were thus massacred. Wow that is less than got massacred in Gaza recently. Jephthah judged Israel for six years, until his death. He was buried in one of the cities of the region of Gilead.
xxx/ellauri114.html on line 676: The modern use derives from an account in the Hebrew Bible, in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Ephraimites, whose dialect used a differently sounding first consonant. The difference concerns the Hebrew letter shin, which is now pronounced as [ʃ] (as in shoe). In the Book of Judges, chapter 12, after the inhabitants of Gilead under the command of Jephthah inflicted a military defeat upon the invading tribe of Ephraim (around 1370–1070 BC), the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross the River Jordan back into their home territory, but the Gileadites secured the river's fords to stop them. To identify and kill these Ephraimites, the Gileadites told each suspected survivor to say the word shibboleth. The Ephraimite dialect resulted in a pronunciation that, to Gileadites, sounded like sibboleth. In the King James Bible the anecdote appears thus (with the word already in its current English spelling):
xxx/ellauri114.html on line 678: And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
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