Mehu'man (Helj. Mehuman', ')'2^nT2, either from the ^yx. faithful, or from some unknown Persian word ; Sept. 'k\.iav, Yidg, Mehumani), the tirst named of the seven eunuchs whom Xerxes commanded to bring in Vashti to the royal presence (Esth. i, 10). B.C. 483.
Mehu'nim (Keb. Meilnim,' D"3^""a, habitations, as in 1 Chron. iv, 41, etc.; Sept. in Ezra, Moovvtii.i v. r. Moovvii^i, Auth.Yers. '■ Meunim ;" in Neh. Misivwfi v. r. Mtifioi'; Vulg. constantly Muni/n), apparently a person whose "children" returned among the Nethinim from Babylon (Ezra ii, 50 ; Neh. vii, 52) ; but rather, perhaps, to be regarded as indicating the inhabitants of some town in Palestine where they settled after the exile, and in that case probably identical with the inhabitants of Maon (or possibly the '"Mehmiims" [below] of 2 Chron. xxvi, 7). See jMaoxite.
MEKUNIMS, THE (Ci3^r52n, i. e. ike Me'unim ; Sept. 01 MitvaloL v. r. o'l MivaToi ; Vulg. Amnionilce), a people against whom king Uzziah waged a successful war (2 Chron. xxvi, 7). Although so diiferent in its English dress, yet the name is in the original merely the plural of Maon ("p"^), a nation named among those who in the earlier days of their settlement in Palestine harassed and oppressed Israel. Maon, or the Maonites, probably inhabited the country at the back of tlie great range of Seir, the modern esh-Sherah, which forms the eastern side of the Wady el-Arabah, where at the pres- ent day there is still a town of the same name (Burck- hardt, Syria, Aug. 24). This is quite in accordance with the terms of 2 Chron. xxvi, 7, where the Mehunim are mentioned with " the Arabians of Gur-baal," or, as the Sept. renders it, Petra. Another notice of the Mehu- nims in the reign of Hezekiah (B.C. cir. 726-697) is found in 1 Chron. iv, 41, Here they are spoken of as a pastoral people, either themselves Hamites, or in alli- ance with Hamites, quiet and peaceable, dwelling in tents. They had been settled from " of old," i, e. abo- riginally, at the east end of the valley of Gedor or Ge- rar, in the wilderness south of Palestine. A connection with Mount Seir is hinted at, though obscurely (ver. 42). Here, however, the Auth, Vers,— probably following the translations of Luther and Junius, which in their turn
follow the Targum — treats the word as an ordinary noun, and renders it "habitations;" a reading now relinquished by scholars, who understand the word to refer to the people in question (Gesenius, Thesaur. p, 1002 a, and Xotes on Burckhardt, p. 1069; Bertheau, CAro?iii). A tliird notice of the Mehunim, corroborative of those al- ready mentioned, is found in the narrative of 2 Chron, XX, There is every reason to believe that in ver, 1 " the Ammonites" should be read as " the Maonites," who in that case are the " men of Mount Seir" mentioned later in the narrative (ver, 10, 22),
In all these passages, including the last, the Sept, ren- ders the name by o'l Mtivaloi — the Minaaans — a nation of Arabia renowned for their traffic in spices, who are named' by Strabo, Ptolemy, and other ancient geogra- phers, and whose seat is now ascertained to have been the south-west portion of the great Arabian peninsula, the western half of the modern Hadramaut (Smith, Diet, of Geography, s, v, Minoei). Bochart has pointed out {Phaleg, vol, ii, cap, xxii), with reason, that distance alone renders it impossible that these Minteans can be the Meunim of the Bible, and also that the people of the Arabian peninsula are Shemites, while the Meunim ap- pear to have been descended from Ham (1 Chron, iv, 41). But, with his usual turn for etymological specula- tion, he endeavors nevertheless to establish an identity between the two, on the ground that Cam al-Munasil, a place two days' journey south of ]\lecca, one of the towns of the Minasans, signifies the " horii of habita- tions," and might therefore be equivalent to the Hebrew' Meonim. Josephus (^1 nt. ix, 10, 3) calls them " the Arabs who adjoined Egypt," and speaks of a city built by Uz- ziah on the Red" Sea to overawe them, Ewald {Ge- sckichie, i, 323, note) suggests that the southern Minfe- ans were a colony from the Maonites of Mount Seir, who in their turn he appears to consider a remnant of the Amorites (see the text of the same page). That the Minaeans were familiar to the translators of the Sept. is evident from the fact that they not only introduce the name on the occasions already mentioned, but that they further use it as equivalent to Naamathite, Zophar the Naamathite, one of the three friends of Job, is by them presented as " Sophar the Mina^an," and " Sophar king of the Minaeans." In this connection it is not un- worthy of notice that as there was a town called Maon in the mountain-district of Judah, so there was one called Naamah in the lowland of the same tribe. El- jMinyay, which is or was the first station south of Gaza, is probably identical with Minois, a place mentioned with distinction in the Christian records of Palestine in the 5th and 6th centuries (Reland, Palcest. p. 899 ; Le Quien, Oriens Christ, iii, 669), and both may retain a trace of the Minaeans. Baal-meox, a town on the east of Jordan, near Heshbon, still called Ma'in, probably also retains a trace of the presence of the Maonites or Mehimim north of their proper locality.