[Wüstenfeld], Vol. 3, p. 829). This Ṛajfe is situated not far from Bilbejs in Egypt, and in the year 733 B. C. the authority of Tiglath Pileser IV did not extend at all to the southwest of the town of Gaza. There is not a single Biblical or Assyrian record which would imply with certainty that any of the tribes of Madian pitched their tents on the Sinai peninsula in the first half of the first millennium before Christ.
Badana
The tribe of Badana is not referred to elsewhere. The name itself recalls the tribe of Bdûn, or Mdûn, whose camps are found in the highest mountains of the Ḥeǧâz to the southeast of the oasis of al-ʻEla’, or the former Dajdân. The surrounding tribes assert that these folk are of very ancient origin and are related to nobody. A clan of Bdûn, or Mdûn, dwells near Petra.
The name Badana is very similar to Badanatha (Pliny, Nat. hist., VI, 157), but the reading Badanatha is not certain. There is better authority for the form Baclanaza (in Detlefsen’s edition of the Naturalis historia, loc. cit). If the reading Badanatha were certain, we might surmise the inhabitants of the oasis of Bada’, which is to the west of al-ʻEla’ (Dajdân) and is mentioned also by Ptolemy, Geography, VI, 7: 30, as Badais, and by Stephen of Byzantium, Ethnica (Meineke), p. 155, as Badeos. In the whole territory of former Madian there are no ruins of a place called Beden, with which Badana was identified by F. P. Dhorme, Les pays bibliques et lʻAssyrie, p. 196. Beden is an incorrect transcription of Bedʻ, as the classical oasis of Madiama (Madian) is now called, and this cannot at the same time be identical with the classical oasis of Badanatha.
The Assyrian name Badana is somewhat like the Hebrew Madan, as it is vocalized in the Septuagint version of Genesis, 25: 2. At the beginning of a word b is often interchanged with m. According to the Bible, Madan is related to the Madianites just as is ʻÊfa’, the Assyrian Ḫajappa. The Assyrian record unites the last-named with Badana, thus justifying us in assigning Madan or Badana to the Biblical tribe of ʻÊfa’ and in locating its camping place near the oasis of Tejma: that is to the southeast of the present settlement of al-ʻAḳaba, or the ancient Elath.
The southern Arabian inscriptions likewise record a settlement of Madan in northwestern Arabia (Glaser’s inscriptions [collated by Adolf Grohmann], National-Bibliothek, Vienna, No. 1238).
Ḫatti
