Goshen

Goshen is a Hebrew place name describing the march Goshen of Mizrajim (ancient Egypt). It is located in the eastern Nile delta, west of the Sinai Peninsula and the Suez canal.

Goshen may also refer to the following, most named for the biblical locale:

Places

Australia

Canada

Isle of Man

South Africa

United Kingdom

United States

Cities and towns

Goshen, Indiana

Goshen /ˈɡoʊʃən/ is a city in and the county seat of Elkhart County, Indiana, United States. It is the smaller of the two principal cities of the Elkhart-Goshen Metropolitan Statistical Area, which in turn is part of the South Bend-Elkhart-Mishawaka Combined Statistical Area. It is located in the northern part of Indiana near the Michigan border, in a region known as Michiana. Goshen is located 10 miles southeast of Elkhart, 25 miles southeast of South Bend, 120 miles east of Chicago, and 150 miles north of Indianapolis. The population was 31,719 at the 2010 census. The city is known as a center of manufacturing for recreational vehicles and accessories, the home of Goshen College, a small Mennonite liberal arts college, and home to the Elkhart County 4-H Fair, one of the largest county fairs in the United States.

History

Goshen was platted in 1831. It was named after the Land of Goshen. The initial settlers consisted entirely of old stock "Yankee" immigrants, who were descended from the English Puritans who settled New England in the 1600s. The New England Yankee population that founded towns such as Goshen considered themselves the "chosen people" and identified with the Israelites of the Old Testament and they thought of North America as their Canaan. They founded a large number of towns and counties across what is known as the Northern Tier of the upper midwest. It was in this context that Goshen was named.

Land of Goshen

The Land of Goshen (Hebrew: אֶרֶץ גֹּשֶׁן‎ or ארץ גושן Eretz Gošen) is named in the Bible as the place in Egypt given to the Hebrews by the pharaoh of Joseph (Genesis 45:9 - 10), and the land from which they later left Egypt at the time of the Exodus. It was located in the eastern Delta of the Nile.

Meaning of the name

If the Septuagint reading "Gesem" is correct, the word, which in its Hebrew form has no known meaning, may mean "cultivated"—comparing the Arabic root j-š-m, "to labor." Egyptologists have suggested a connection with the Egyptian word qas, meaning "inundated land" because Goshen was apparently the same region, called by the Greeks the "Arabian nome," which had its capital at Phakousa representing the Egyptian Pa-qas (Brugsch, Geog., I, 298), the name of a town, with the determinative for "pouring forth".Donald Redford, while not disputing the location of Goshen, gives a different origin for the name, deriving it from "Gasmu," the rulers of the Bedouin Qedarites who occupied the eastern Delta from the 7th century BC, but John Van Seters thinks this unlikely.