The Yehudit pronunciation can be equally correct with Gal-Ed or Gil'ad; the latter is generally preferred, but is it correct? We shall see. The English rendition is always Gilead, which is never correct.
Genesis 31:21 describes it as the hill country to which Ya'akov (Jacob) fled from Lavan (Laban); south of the Yavok (Jabbok) river, which today is reckoned - almost certainly wrongly because it's too far south - to be the Zarqa.
Deuteronomy 3:12-14 is more precise; Mosheh is speaking about the land east of the Yarden and north of Mo-Av:
"Of the land that we took over at that time, I gave the Beney Re'u-Ven and the Beney Gad the territory north of Aro'er by the Arnon Gorge, including half the hill country of Gil'ad, together with its towns. The rest of Gil'ad, and also all of Bashan, the kingdom of Og, I gave to the half-tribe of Menasheh. The whole region of Argov in Bashan used to be known as a land of the Repha'im; Ya'ir, a descendant of Menasheh, took the whole region of Argov as far as the border of the Beney Geshur and the Beney Ma'achah; it was named after him, so that to this day Bashan is called Chavot Ya'ir."This defines Gil'ad as the east bank of the river Yarden, more or less parallel to today's Palestinian West Bank. It includes the whole mountain region between the Arnon and Bashan, inhabited by the tribes of Gad, Re'u-Ven and the eastern half of Menasheh. Gil'ad and Gad are often interchangeable names (e.g 1 Samuel 13:7), and in Numbers 36:1 the two-and-a-half tribes are conjoined explicitly as the Beney Gil'ad.
In Genesis 31:48, however, both the pointing and the given explanation make it very clearly Gal-Ed rather than Gil'ad. Lavan (Laban) calls it Yegar-Sahaduta (יְגַר שָׂהֲדוּתָא - see footnote [1]), which is usually translated as "Cairn of Witness" in Aramaic; Gal-Ed means the same in Yehudit, from Gal = "a heap of stones" (cf Jeremiah 9:10 - 9:11 in some Christian versions - and 51:37, Isaiah 25:2), and Ed (עד) = "a witness"; whereas Gil'ad means "stony region". If it was indeed a cairn, then we are speaking of an extremely ancient shrine, for the cairns belong to the megalithic period of the first settlers. In the Ya'akov-Lavan tale we are told (Genesis 31:52) that this cairn was specifically a boundary-marker; and knowing that Ya'akov was the goat-god (or his sacred king) and Lavan the moon-god (or his high priest), even as a boundary marker we can treat it as the division between two religions and their worshippers, and not merely between two clans of the same tribe - who, in those nomadic days, did not generally use boundary-markers anyway. It is surely no coincidence that the religious boundary between Ya'akov and Lavan should have been agreed in the territory of Gad, one of whose meanings is "goat".
Note that the word Gil-Gal (גלגל) comes in part from the same root, the Gil being a circle, the Gal a heap of stones; a structure very similar to Delphi and Stonehenge and the Muisca solar observatory of the Leyva Valley, near Bogota in Colombia (illustration below). A number of places named Gil-Gal are found in the Tanach.
The prophet Shemu-El's (Samuel's) successor was named Gad as well, and the same Ya'akov-Lavan text (Genesis 31:49) says that Gal-Ed was also called Ha-Mitspah (המצפה), which is an important note, since Mitspah or Mitspeh was the central shrine of Shemu-El's hegemony, where he gathered the Beney Yisra-El (1 Samuel 7:5 ff) before the war against the Pelishtim (Philistines). Thus the link between the two prophets of the shrine is made verbal, and from it we can deduce the nature of the shrine, the precise role of Shemu-El, and thence the nature of the kingship established by king David. See notes to GAD, especially the comment upon Gad as the God of Fortune (Pan, who is also the goat-god), and the link between Ya'akov's blessing of Gad and David's years as a mercenary.
Genesis 37:25 tells us that the Beney Yishma-El to whom Yoseph was sold were on their way from Gil'ad. We are not told why, but these important shrines were all caravanserai, and for Beney Edom trading between Damasek (Damascus) and On (Heliopolis), two of the major cities of the Levant at the time, it would have been the logical route.
Numbers 26:29 names Gil'ad (גִּלְעָד) as a son of Machir (מכיר), himself a son of Menasheh, and thus by tribe a Beney Yoseph. This Gil'ad is also said to be the eponymous founder of a tribe, or at least a clan, called the Beney Gil'ad.
In fact, from Judges 5:14, we can reckon that Machir may well have been the original tribal name, which was later changed to Menasheh precisely in order to establish a link to Yoseph where none in truth existed (as Ben-Oni was attached to Bin-Yamin). Machir means "sold" - perhaps to the Beney Menasheh, as Machpelah was "sold" to Av-Raham: a transfer of a shrine from one deity to another. Numbers 26:30 gives Gil'ad's family as I-Ezer (איעזר), Chelek (חלק), Asri-El (אשריאל), Shechem (שכם), Shemida (שמידע), and Chepher (חפר), though the text regards all of these "sons" rather as tribal names.
I-Ezer, which appears to mean "hopeless", is probably an abbreviation of Avi-Ezer (אביעזר); and again we have a link to the stories of David, for Avi-Ezer of Anatot was one of his thirty "Giborim" or mighty men (2 Samuel 23:27, though the link will give you the complete list). That he should have come from Anatot - Christian Bethany; the shrine of Anat, the wife of Ba'al - is itself not without sgnificance.
Chelek means "a share" or "division" or "portion" or "lot" and is used throughout the Tanach to specify that portion of the sacrifice reserved for the Beney Levi. This is only one of several meanings, but worth highlighting precisely because his brother Shechem means "the shoulder", and the shoulder was the royal portion of the burnt offering, i.e the part saved for the Kohanim.
Asri-El means a vow to El (cf Joshua 17:2 and 1 Chronicles 7:14).
Shemida is the announcement of the name of a god (the ancient equivalent of the tolling of the church bell to summon the worshippers; or more closely the Muslim manner of summoning to prayer through the declaration of the greatness of al-Lah). An alternate view suggests that Shemida may in fact be Shem-Yada (same spelling but, like Gil'ad and Gal-Ed, a question of how you read the letters); if so, Shem means "name" and Yada means "known", so something like the equivalent of calling your child "Red Carpet" or "Celebrity"; which is actually, if you think about, exactly the same as the first explanation, but applied humanly rather than divinely.
Chepher is "a pit" or "a well", one of the key raisons d'être of the shrine's coming into existence in the first place.
Thus we can say that all the "sons" of Machir relate to areas of the shrine or functions of the ritual that take place at the shrine, and reading Machir as a synonym for Menasheh, we can yet again demonstrate that the tribes were not social or political groupings, but primarily religious ones, focused on a particular shrine of a particular deity or member of the pantheon. A modern equivalent might be the finding of a family tree in which the names of the "children" were "Clerk", "Secretary", "Doorman", "Guard", "Executive", and "Boss".
Given the extent to which David operated out of Gil'ad and Menasheh (plus the Cave of Adul-Am and the area around Ein Gedi, also linked to the goat-cult), we can begin to re-examine the entire set of Davidic legends in the light of the above. Bearing in mind that it was David who created the twelve-tribe amphictyony that was [probably] named Yisra-El, we can add one last link in the chain that binds Ya'akov and David, and begin to search for evidence that David was originally the oracular hero of the goat-cult, before he conquered Chevron and Yeru-Shala'im and established himself as a sun-hero instead (as well?).
Judges 11:1 and 12:7 name Yiphtach (Jephtah) of the Beney Gil'ad as a judge. Yehudit has three words for a judge: Dayan (דין), Dan (דן) and Shophet (שפת). The first two cover strictly judicial matters; the third is used in the broader sense of a person who passes judgments, a critic in today's parlance, but Shophtim - the plural form - was also the Yehudit name for The Book of Judges. Yiphtach was a Shophet.
See also 1 Chronicles 5:13 ff., which has a genealogical table that includes a son of Gil'ad.
Hosea 6:8 regards Gil'ad as a city.
Song of Songs 4:1 speaks of Mount Gil'ad, and note the reference (a rather awful piece of poetry, but we can overlook that) to goats.
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Footnote [1]: How intriguing to learn that Lavan did not speak the same language as his own nephew, that one spoke an early form of Aramaic, the other presumably Kinnahu, itself an early form of what would later be called Yehudit (and later still, incorrectly, Hebrew), and even after twenty-plus years, he is still having to explain across languages, so we can take it that Ya'akov was not a great linguist. But if Lavan spoke Aramaic, then so presumably did Le'ah and Rachel and, presumably, their aunt Rivkah before she moved to Kena'an and married Yitschak. Av-Ram, and Sarai would also have spoken that language...
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