Sanballat the Horonite

Sanballat the Horonite or Sanballat I was a Samaritan leader and official of the Achaemenid Empire of Greater Iran who lived in the mid to late fifth century BC and was a contemporary of Nehemiah.

Etymology of name

In Hebrew the name is Sanballat (Hebrew: סַנְבַלָּט‎). Eberhard Schrader, cited in Brown–Driver–Briggs, considered that the name in Akkadian was Sīnuballit, from the name of the Sumerian moon god Sīn meaning "Sīn has begotten."

The name of the god Sīn in the context of Sanballat's name has since been mistakenly confused with the unrelated English noun sin in some popular English commentaries on Nehemiah. Other earlier commentators had sometimes taken Sanballat as being a military rank rather than a name.

Biblical account

Nehemiah

He is best known from the Book of Nehemiah, which casts him as one of the chief opponents of the Jewish governor Nehemiah during the latter's efforts to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and carrying out his reforms among the Jews. In Jewish tradition, he was called "the Horonite," (another possible "the Harranite") and was associated with Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem the Arabian. His home was evidently at Samaria.