me'-red (meredh, "rebellion"; Septuagint has at least four variants in 1 Chronicles 4:17-18): A descendant of Judah through Caleb, and mentioned as a "son of Ezrah" (1 Chronicles 4:17).

Revised Version, rightly following the orthography of the Hebrew which has here the Hebrew letter he (h) instead of 'aleph (') , as in the name of the well-known Ezra, saves us from confusing this Ezrah with the other by giving him the correct terminal letter. Moreover, even if the question of spelling were waived, the absence of the mention of children in any known passages of the life of the scribe Ezra should settle the question, since this passage (1 Chronicles 4:17) is associated with progeny.

A difficulty meets us in 1 Chronicles 4:18, where Mered is mentioned as taking to wife "Bithiah the daughter of Pharaoh." That Pharaoh is not the proper name of some individual but the official title of Egypt's sovereign seems evident from the fact that the King James Version margin and the Revised Version (British and American) text agree in translating the other wife of Mered as "the Jewess," rather than as a proper name Jehudijah, as if to distinguish the "Jewess" from the Egyptian. Probably "Hodiah" also is a corruption of Jehudijah in 1 Chronicles 4:19, and should be translated again "the Jewess." Targums and traditions have so changed and transposed and "interpreted" this passage that a sufficiently confused text has become worse confounded, and the only solid fact that emerges is that once a comparatively obscure Judahite (though the founder of several towns--Gedor, Soco, Eshtemoa, etc., 1 Chronicles 4:18) married an Egyptian princess, whether as a captive or a freewoman we do not know.

See BITHIAH .

Henry Wallace

From the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
Edited by James Orr, published in 1939 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

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