Kedar

AI summary: Kedar matters because the cross references move quickly from individual ancestry to collective identity. Prophets and poets use "Kedar" to speak of desert tribes, dark tents, trade, remoteness, and at times judgment, showing how a personal name can become shorthand for an entire social world. This gives the figure enduring symbolic and geographic significance beyond the genealogy itself. Taken together, the material presents Kedar as an Ishmaelite ancestor whose name becomes one of the Bible's most recognizable labels for Arabian peoples.¹

Dark-skinned, the second son of Ishmael (Gen. 25:13). It is the name for the nomadic tribes of Arabs, the Bedouins generally (Isa. 21:16; 42:11; 60:7; Jer. 2:10; Ezek. 27:21), who dwelt in the north-west of Arabia. They lived in black hair-tents (Cant. 1:5). To “dwell in the tents of Kedar” was to be cut off from the worship of the true God (Ps. 120:5). The Kedarites suffered at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar (Jer. 49:28, 29). ³