Tob was the name of a place in ancient Israel

History of ancient Israel and Judah

Israel and Judah were related Iron Age kingdoms of ancient Palestine. The earliest known reference to the name Israel in archaeological records is in the Merneptah stele, an Egyptian record of c. 1209 BCE. By the 9th century BCE the Kingdom of Israel had emerged as an important local power before...

, mentioned in the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

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It is said to be the land to which Jephtha

Jephtha

Jephthah is a character in the Old Testament's Book of Judges, serving as a judge over Israel for a period of six years . He lived in Gilead and was a member of the Tribe of Manasseh. His father's name was also Gilead...

 fled from his brothers. The location is not definitely known, but some identify it with the region centering on Taibiyah, southeast of Sea of Galilee

Sea of Galilee

The Sea of Galilee, also Kinneret, Lake of Gennesaret, or Lake Tiberias , is the largest freshwater lake in Israel, and it is approximately in circumference, about long, and wide. The lake has a total area of , and a maximum depth of approximately 43 m...

. Since the suffix

Suffix

In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...

 -iYa means -mine, Taibeyah means basically: "My Tob" or "Our Tob" or "Me (of) Tob" or us, "We of Tob".

In Tob, Jephtha gathered some men until his brothers wanted him back to fight against the Ammon

Ammon

Ammon , also referred to as the Ammonites and children of Ammon, was an ancient nation located east of the Jordan River, Gilead, and the Dead Sea, in present-day Jordan. The chief city of the country was Rabbah or Rabbath Ammon, site of the modern city of Amman, Jordan's capital...

ites. The place may be the same as the one mentioned in 2 Samuel 10:6-8, named Ishtob

Ishtob

Ishtob was one of the small Syrian Kingdoms that made up Aram.*In 2 Samuel 10:6 it is listed as one of the kingdoms that Ammon hired soldiers fromIshtob also means "man of Tob"-References:*New International Version Bible...

. Some believe it should be translated "men of Tob", rather than "Ishtob".

Tob is also the town referred to in the Amarna letters

Amarna letters

The Amarna letters are an archive of correspondence on clay tablets, mostly diplomatic, between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom...

, centering about 1350 BCE. There are about 382 letters, EA 1 through EA 382. There is only one usage of the town (the word TuBu) and in this small group of letters, the leader of the town Tubu

Tubu (town)

Tubu is the town east of the Sea of Galilee referred to in the of the Amarna letters.Tubu is the probable biblical town of Tob. In the entire group of El Amarna letters, EA 205 is the only usage of the name Tubu, and only the "Man" is referenced.The scribe who wrote EA 205, visited and /or wrote...

 is only referred to as the "Man" of the town, i.e. "the Mayor" or "governor". Man was one of many common designations. He would have been a prince type or some local leader equivalent; the chief of a tribe, clan, city, region, etc. EA letter 205 is the letter from the "Man of Tubu" and is one of (6) letters, all written by the same scribe

Scribe

A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession and helps the city keep track of its records. The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing...

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