TAHPANHES tä’ pə nēz (תְּחַפְנְחֵס׃֙, Ezek 30:18; LXX Ταφνάς) also TAHAPANES te hăp’ e nĭz, Jer 2:16, TAPHNEZ, tăf’ nēz KJV (Judg 1:9). An Egyp. town.

Tahpanhes is named with Memphis (KJV Noph, Jer 2:16) as an opponent of Israel and, with Migdol, as a place to which Jewish exiles fled after the murder of Gedaliah following the sack of Judah by the Babylonians in 587 b.c., when Jeremiah was reluctantly compelled to join them (Jer 44:1). Tahpanhes may be the Heb. transliteration of Tḥpnḥs a place mentioned in a Phoen. papyrus letter of the 6th cent. b.c. from Egypt. This text refers to “Baal-zephon and the gods of Tahpanhes,” from which it is thought that the city must have earlier borne the name of Baalzephon, an Israelite staging post during the Exodus (Exod 14:2). The name may represent an Egyp. t’ḥ(rnt)-p’nḥsy, “palace of the Nubian,” perhaps an indication of its foundation during the reign of Tirhakah (2 Kings 19:9). The Gr. form of the name supports identification with Daphnai, on the Pelusiac branch of the Nile River, which Herodotus (ii. 30, 107) says was garrisoned by Gr. mercenaries set there by Psammetichus during the twenty-sixth dynasty (664-610 b.c.) to repel the incursions of Arabians and other Asiatics.

Tahpanhes is commonly located at Tell Defneh (Defenneh), twenty-seven m. SSW of Port Said (nine m. W of El-Qanṭara). In 1886 Flinders Petrie partially excavated Qasr bint al-Yahudi (Mansion of the Jew’s daughter), finding both Gr. pottery and a fortress of Psammetichus I, outside which lay a Ramesside period brick platform which might be the “brick pavement” of the “house of pharaoh in Tahpanhes,” where Jeremiah hid stones to mark the place where he predicted that the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar II would erect his throne (Jer 43:9). A fragmentary Neo-Babylonian text of the thirty-seventh year of Nebuchadrezzar outlines operations against Egypt and mentions the Egyp. king Amasis and a Gr. garrison (Putu-Iaman). However, the cylinders of Nebuchadrezzar said to have been found at Tell Defneh, now in the Cairo Museum, are imported copies of his standard building inscrs. from Babylon itself.

Bibliography F. Petrie, Tanis II; Nebesheh (AM) and Defenneh (Tahpanhes) (1888), 47-96; A. Dupont-Sommer, PEQ LXXXI (1949), 52-57; W. F. Albright, “Baal-Zephon,” Festschrift Alfred Bertholet (1950), 13, 14.