Village

Village - (Webster's 1828 Dictionary)

VIL'LAGE, n. A small assemblage of houses, less than a town or city, and inhabited chiefly by farmers and other laboring people. In England, it is said that a village is distinguished from a town by the want of a market.

In the United States, no such distinction exists, and any small assemblage of houses in the country is called a village.

vil'-aj (qaphar, chawwoth, qatserim, banoth, perazoth; kome):

(1) The general term for a village, in common with Aramaic and Arabic is qaphar (So 7:11; 1Ch 27:25; kopher; 1Sa 6:18; kephir, Ne 6:2). This designation is derived from the idea of its offering "cover" or shelter. It is used in combination, and place-names of this formation became prominent in post-Biblical times, probably because the villages so named had then grown into towns. A well-known Biblical instance of such names is Capernaum.

(2) Chawwoth (always "town" in English Versions of the Bible; see HAVVOTH-JAIR) means originally a group of tents (Arabic chiwa'). These in settled life soon became more permanent dwellings, or what we understand by a village. The term, however, is applied only to the villages of Jair in the tribe of Manasseh (Nu 32:41; 1Ki 4:13).

(3) Chatserim likewise came from nomadic life. They were originally enclosures specially for cattle, alongside of which dwellings for the herdsmen and peasantry naturally grew up (see HAZAR-ADDAR; HAZOR). They were unwalled (Le 25:31) and lay around the cities (Jos 19:8).

(4) Banoth is literally "daughters." The word is applied to the dependent villages lying around the larger cities, and to which they looked as to a kind of metropolis (Nu 21:25, etc.); the Revised Version (British and American) "towns" except in Nu 32:42.

(5) Perazoth means "the open country," but it soon came to mean the villages scattered in the open (Eze 38:11; Zec 2:4; Es 9:19). Some have sought to connect the Perizzites with this word and to regard them, not as a distinct people, but as the peasant class. Attempts have also been m

ade to connect perazon in Jud 5:7,11 with the same root, and the King James Version rendered it "inhabitants of the villages." the Revised Version (British and American), on the contrary, gives it the meaning of "rulers." The versions indicate a word meaning authority, and probably the text should be emended to read rozenim, "rulers." A similar emendation is required in Hab 3:14. "Village" in the Revised Version (British and American) of the New Testament invariably represents the Greek kome, but in 2 Macc 8:6 the Revised Version (British and American) Apocrypha has "village" for chora, lit. "country."

See CITY; TOWN.

W. M. Christie