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Places of the Bible

Elam

Country · region

Where the name appears

Events told in passages that name Elam, and how many of their verses do. That is not the same as saying they happened here: a place can be named as a landmark, as somewhere being travelled to, or as the subject of a prophecy.

A dot is a moment; a bar is something that lasted, drawn to its length. The fainter the mark, the fewer verses name the place.

  • Prophecies of Isaiah · 758 BC · 3 verses
  • Prophecies of Jeremiah · 627 BC · 7 verses
  • Prophecies of Daniel · 605 BC · 1 verse
  • Prophecies of Ezekiel · 592 BC · 1 verse

Easton’s Bible Dictionary

Highland, the son of Shem (Gen. 10:22), and the name of the country inhabited by his descendants (14:1, 9; Isa. 11:11; 21:2, etc.) lying to the east of Babylonia, and extending to the shore of the Mediterranean, a distance in a direct line of about 1,000 miles. The name Elam is an Assyrian word meaning “high.”

“The inhabitants of Elam, or ‘the Highlands,’ to the east of Babylon, were called Elamites. They were divided into several branches, speaking different dialects of the same agglutinative language. The race to which they belonged was brachycephalic, or short-headed, like the pre-Semitic Sumerians of Babylonia.

“The earliest Elamite kingdom seems to have been that of Anzan, the exact site of which is uncertain; but in the time of Abraham, Shushan or Susa appears to have already become the capital of the country. Babylonia was frequently invaded by the Elamite kings, who at times asserted their supremacy over it (as in the case of Chedorlaomer, the Kudur-Lagamar, or ‘servant of the goddess Lagamar,’ of the cuneiform texts).

“The later Assyrian monarchs made several campaigns against Elam, and finally Assur-bani-pal (about B.C. 650) succeeded in conquering the country, which was ravaged with fire and sword. On the fall of the Assyrian Empire, Elam passed into the hands of the Persians” (A.H. Sayce).

This country was called by the Greeks Cissia or Susiana.

From M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1893), in the public domain.

Named in 14 verses

Genesis
14:1, 14:9
Isaiah
11:11, 21:2, 22:6
Jeremiah
25:25, 49:34, 49:35, 49:36, 49:37, 49:38, 49:39
Ezekiel
32:24
Daniel
8:2

The place, its people and its events come from Theographic, a knowledge graph of the Bible by Robert Rouse, used and shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.