5. Some short remarks upon Cana, John 2:2.

It is very disputable which should be the first letter of the word Cana, whether Caph or Koph, for we find both.

I. Kanah, with the initial letter Koph, is a city in the tribe of Asher, Joshua 19:28.

II. Kene, a word not very much differing in the sound, occurs amongst the Talmudists, "Rabbi and his Sanhedrim, having numbered votes, pronounced Keni, clean."--Gloss: "Keni was a place of doubtful esteem, reckoned amongst the unclean" [that is, a place of the Gentiles]; "but in the days of R. Judah Haccodesh, it came under trial, and they pronounced it clean."

III. We find Kana in Josephus, but the situation not mentioned: "Antiochus being slain" [viz. when he fought with the Arabian king], "his army fled to the town Kana." This is hardly our Cana, as may in some measure appear in Josephus' context.

IV. But further he speaks in 'His Own Life,' of "Cana in Galilee." As for its situation, as far as can be collected from Josephus, we discuss that in another treatise, and shew that it is not far from that place where the river Jordan dischargeth itself into the sea of Gennesaret; so that between this Cana and Capernaum, there seems to be almost the whole length of that sea.

V. But it must not be forgotten that Canah, beginning with the letter Caph, is met with in Juchasin; the words these: "In the end of the chapter" [it is the seventh chapter of Bavah Mezia] "there is a tradition. Abba Chalaphtha or Caphar Hananiah, in the name of R. Meir, saith," [they are in Bavah Mezia, where he is brought in, and what he said], "It seems to me" (they are the words of the author of Juchasin) "that Caphar Hananiah is Caphar Cana; as may be proved out of the ninth chapter of the book Sheviith: for there was the entrance of the Lower Galilee."

From that place, quoted in Sheviith, which is Hal. 2. it plainly appears that Caphar Hananiah was in the very outmost border that divided the Upper and the Lower Galilee. From whence it is evident, that the entrance of the Lower Galilee, according to our author, was not as we go from Samaria to Galilee, but from the Upper Galilee into the Lower. And whether our Cana of Galilee be so called to distinguish it from that Cana that so divides between the two Galilees, or from that Cana that was in the tribe of Asher (which may not unfitly be called 'Cana of the Sidonians'), it is at the reader's choice to determine. As also, why the Syriac interpreter should in this place write Katna, instead of 'Cana.' Whether he had in his eye or mind Kattath, Joshua 19:15, which, in the vulgar dialect, was called Katanath, as the Seventy render it, and the Jerusalem Talmudists affirm; or whether by a diminutive kind of word Katanah, he would intimate the smallness of the town: q.d. "Cana the Less."