Topic
Cuth; Cuthah
2 passages cited, from 1 classic reference work.
These works date from 1915 and are in the public domain. They reflect the Protestant scholarship of their time: their history, archaeology and dates can be out of date, and where they interpret, other traditions read the text differently. The verses are shown in the King James Version, the wording these works were written against.
The verses
The passages the works cite, those cited by more of them first.
- 2 Kings 17:24ISBE
¶ And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel: and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof.
- 2 Kings 17:30ISBE
And the men of Babylon made Succoth-benoth, and the men of Cuth made Nergal, and the men of Hamath made Ashima,
In the reference works
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915) · 3 references
kuth, ku'-tha (kuth, kuthah; Choua, Chountha): The longer writing is the better of the two, and gives the Hebrew form of the name of one of the cities from which Sargon of Assyria brought colonists to fill the places of the Israelites which he deported from Samaria in 772 BC (2Ki 17:24,30). Probably in consequence of their predominating numbers, the inhabitants of Samaria in general were then called kuthiyim, or Cutbeans. 1. The Ruins of Cuthah:
From contract-tablets found at Tel-Ibrahim by the late Hormuzd Hassam, on which the ancient name of the place is given as Gudua or Kutu, it would seem that that is the site which has to be identified with the Biblical Cuthah. It lies to the Northeast of Babylon, and was one of the most important cities of the Babylonian empire. The explorer describes the ruins as being about 3,000 ft. in circumference and 280 ft. high, and adjoining them on the West lies a smaller mound, crowned with a sanctuary dedicated to Ibrahim (Abraham). From the nature of the ruins, Rassam came to the conclusion that the city was much more densely populated after the fall of Babylon than in earlier times. A portion of the ruins were in a very perfect state, and suggested an unfinished building.
2. The Temple:
The great temple of the city was called E-mes-lam, and was dedicated to Nergal (compare 2Ki 17:30), one of whose names was Meslam-ta-ea. Both city and temple would seem to have been old Sumerian foundations, as the name Gudua and its later Sere form, Kutu, imply.
LITERATURE.
See Rassam, Asshur and the Land of Nimrod, 396, 409, and, for details of the worship of Nergal, PSBA, December, 1906, 203-18.
T. G. Pinches
Texts: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), from the CrossWire SWORD modules (public domain). Verse references were parsed from the works' own markup and checked against the KJV verse list.