Genesis 14:1 names him as the king of Eylam in the War of the Kings.
The meaning of the name is traditionally explained as Aramaic Kedar (כדר) = "handful" + Omer (עמר) = "sheaves of wheat"; thus making him the barley-king, a sacred king of Tammuz. See Drummond for the zodiacal implications of that.
This, however, though seemingly reasonable by any standards of logical deduction, may well, in fact, be wrong. More likely the root is Eylamite Kudur, an equivlent of Eved (עבד) in the Yehudit, with the same variant meanings of "servant," "slave" and "worshipper. Eylamite inscriptions record a "Kudur-Nanḥundi" and a "Kudur-Mabuk". And for the second half, not the Yehudit word for "wheat" (which of course was the challenge that should have been made to the traditional definition, because why would a Mesopotamian name be comprised half of Aramaic and half of Yehudit, neither of which even existed at the time of the person bearing said name?) In fact it is probably from Lagamaru, an Eylamite deity whose temple Ashurbanipal claimed to have destroyed.
None of which should be confused with Kedar (קדר), which has a first-letter Kuph (ק), where Kedar-la-Omer (Kudur-Lagamaru, to give him back what appears to have been his real name) starts with a Chaf (כ). But a first letter Chaf is always medugash (כְּ rather than כ), which is to say a hard K and not a Scots ch; it is therefore not Chedarlaomer, as generally rendered in English.
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