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KEDAR
1. Second son of Ishmael, Abraham’s son (Gn 25:13; 1 Chr 1:29).
2. Tribe or area appearing mainly in the prophetic writings from Solomon to the exile. In Isaiah’s prophecy against Arabia, Kedar is mentioned twice (Is 21:13-17). Along with Arabia, Dedan, and Tema, the Kedarites are threatened with destruction. The pomp attributed to them in verse 16 indicates some degree of affluence (see also Ez 27:21), and the militaristic tone of verse 17 points to the fact that they were a warring people. In Jeremiah 49:28 Kedar is linked with Hazor as victims of Nebuchadnezzar’s conquests. Although there is no extrabiblical record of Nebuchadnezzar’s march on Kedar, Ashurbanipal, the king of Assyria, does mention the conquest of Kedar. That would have been about 650 BC, or a half a century earlier than the Babylonian conquest. Apart from Ashurbanipal’s account, the only other ancient extrabiblical reference to Kedar is found on a silver bowl offered to the Arabian goddess Han-’ilat in the Egyptian Delta. The inscription on the bowl reads, “Cain, son of Geshem, king of Kedar,” and the date is firmly fixed in the fifth century BC. This Geshem was very likely the enemy of Nehemiah (Neh 2:19; 6:1-6).
The picture the Bible gives of Kedar is that of a desert nomadic people descended from Ishmael. They were not initially believers in Yahweh but are included in Isaiah’s prophecy of the future kingdom of God (cf. Is 42:11; 60:7). Their desert environment limited their work to sheep herding and trading. Because of unpredictable water supplies in the desert, they were constantly moving—a way of life best handled by living in tents rather than permanent houses (cf. Ps 120:5; Sg 1:5). For this reason archaeologists have found no site named Kedar. All we can surmise is that the area of Kedar lay to the east and slightly to the south of Israel in what is today the southern part of Jordan. The people of Kedar presumably died out or were assimilated into the surrounding nations.