ARGOB är’ gŏb (אַרְגֹּ֣ב prob. with a prosthetic aleph and from regeb, a clod). 1. An uncertain text leaves the question open whether Argob and Arieh are names of men or names of places (2 Kings 15:25). If they are men, it cannot be determined whether they were fellow-conspirators with Pekah or victims slain with Pekahiah.

As early as 1886 Stade (ZAW VI, 160) had suggested that the phrase “Argob and Arieh” in the MT was a gloss on 2 Kings 15:29 which was written too near v. 25 and since “Gilead” appears in both vv., the scribe mistakenly included the gloss of these two place names in v. 25 instead of v. 29.

2. Argob is a region in Bashan (Deut 3:4, 13, 14; 1 Kings 4:13) in the kingdom of Og containing “sixty cities,” but distinguished from the “villages (ḥavvot) of Jair” which belong to Gilead (1 Kings 4:13; the LXX reading the result of homoeoteleuton (Num 32:41; Judg 10:4; 1 Chron 2:22 and MT of 1 Kings 4:13). In contrast to all these passages Deuteronomy 3:14 wrongly includes these “villages of Jair” “in Bashan” instead of their proper location of Gilead. Deuteronomy 3:14 seems to be corrupt, because the phrase “he called them” (אֹתָ֨ם) lacks its antecedent and “the Bashan” is introduced abruptly into the text.

The location of Argob is fixed by Deuteronomy 3:4, 13, 14 supplying the western border as the territory of the Geshurites, Maachathites (i.e., the present Golan heights) and the targumistic rendering of Argob by Trachona (ṭarkônâ), “stony-region” which is the whole southern part of Bashan, from the eastern edge of el-leğā (Trachon), about twenty m. S of Damascus, approximately to Nahr er-ruggād.

Bibliography J. Simons, The Geographical and Topographical Texts of the O.T. (1959), 89, 124, 129, 133; J. Gray, I and II Kings (1963), 566, note a.