Ezekiel 20:45-46

The Lord commanded Ezekiel to address Teman with a prophecy. Teman (Heb. temanah, right) refers to the south. Perhaps the translators of the NASB left this word transliterated because Teman was also the name of an important town in Edom to Jerusalem’s southeast, and they felt the Lord might have intended this prophecy for that town. The Septuagint translators understood this word this way, and they also interpreted the other two words that describe Judah as place names. The Lord further described the object of this prophecy as the south (Heb. darom) and as the forest in the Negev (Heb. negeb). The Negev was the southern part of Judah that was a buffer geographically between the marginally fruitful southern part of Judah and the wilderness farther to the south. Evidently the whole kingdom of Judah was quite wooded in Ezekiel’s day, and the woods extended south into the upper Negev. By using the three most common Hebrew terms for "south," the Lord referred to Judah. Later He clarified that the south included Jerusalem, its sanctuaries, and all the land of Israel, which was then Judah (cf. Ezekiel 21:2). Judah was, of course, the "Southern Kingdom."