Jair the Gileadite יאיר הגלעדי

The line about thirty donkeys is not a curiosity. In an age when the horse meant a foreign king's chariotry, the donkey was the animal of one's own: judges, elders and the kings of Israel down to Solomon rode donkeys. Thirty sons on thirty donkeys, holding thirty towns, is a description of settled authority — a large family spread across a whole district.

Those towns were called Havvoth-jair, "the villages of Jair," and were still so called "to this day," the book notes. An earlier man named Jair, from the days of the conquest of Transjordan, has villages named the same way; the book of Judges does not pause over it.

He was buried at Kamon. The rest is twenty-two years without a single incident.

The years here are computed by adding up the terms given in the book of Judges itself, counting from the death of Joshua; they are not stated as such in the source.