("a witness heap".) A Hebrew name given by Jacob to the heap which he and Laban reared on mount Gilead, a memorial of their brotherly covenant (Genesis 31:47-48). Laban called it in Aramaic (Chaldee or Syriac), Jegar-Sahadutha. (See JEGAR-SAHADUTHA.) Apparently Nahor's family originally spoke Syriac, and Abraham and his family acquired Hebrew in Canaan, where the Hebrew was indigenous when he first settled there, the Hamitic Canaanites having learned it from an earlier Semitic race. The memorial heap marked the crisis in Jacob's life when he became severed from his Syrian kindred, and henceforth a sojourner in, and heir of, Canaan.