SHIBBOLETH shĭb’ ə lĭth (שִׁבֹּ֫לֶת֒, H8672, flowing stream, Ps 69:2; ear of corn, Job 24:24; the pl. form shibbōlīm, ears of corn, Gen 41:5-7; Ruth 2:2; branches, Zech 4:12). The password used by the Gileadites at the Jordan to detect the fleeing Ephraimites. The narrative of Judges 12:1-6 describes how Jephthah had just concluded a very successful campaign against the Ammonites without the aid of the Ephraimites. The latter were angered at being left out of such an opportunity to assert leadership among the tribes, and made very arrogant threats toward Jephthah (cf. Judg 8:1-3). Jephthah replied that his call to the Ephraimites for help had gone unheeded. In the battle which followed, Jephthah’s band of Gileadites gained the upper hand and held the fords of the Jordan. As the Ephraimites sought to escape across the river they were challenged to prove, by pronouncing the password, that they were not Ephraimites. Each of the fugitives in turn was unable to pass the test and, in mispronouncing the word, gave himself away and was killed.

The significant point to the story is not the meaning of the word shibboleth, but its pronunciation. So Eng. VSS do not tr. but merely transliterate the word, along with the Ephraimite attempt to pronounce it: sibboleth (Heb. סִבֹּלֶת). It is clear that the word was chosen because it would reveal one of the dialectic pronunciation differences between the two groups. It may be oversimplifying the matter to conclude that the differences were necessarily in terms of the conventional pronunciation of the Heb. sibilants שׁ (sh) and ס (s). The LXX has Σύνθημα (password) for shibboleth in text A, and Στἀχυς (ear of corn) in text B, but neither text seeks to reproduce an actual mispronounced Ephraimite VS, saying only that they could not repeat the word correctly. This seems to be most obviously explained by the fact that the Gr. alphabet does not distinguish between sh and s. Speiser has suggested that this solution is not corroborated by any evidence, and that any of the W Sem. languages did not have both sounds as independent phonemes. He provides the alternative theory that the Gileadites may have used an initial th sound for sh, which was completely foreign to the Israelites. The Ephraimites, in attempting this strange sound, managed to reproduce only s.

Bibliography G. F. Moore, Judges (1895); E. A. Speiser, “The Shibboleth Incident,” BASOR, LXXXV (1942), 10-13.