EDREI ĕd’ re ī (אֶדְרֶֽעִי, strong? [meaning uncertain]). Town name. 1. A residence city of Og, king of Bashan (Deut 1:4; 3:10; Josh 12:4; 13:12). Built on a bluff overlooking a southern fork of the Yarmuk River, along the S boundary of Bashan (q.v.) near the eastern desert. Here Og could watch for invaders from the S or from the E. Moses defeated Og in a pitched battle outside of Edrei, which was then destroyed (Num 21:33-35; Deut 3:1-6). The ruins were included in the allotment to the Machir clan of the tribe of Manasseh (Josh 13:31). Edrei is identified with modern Der’a, a town of 5,000 in southern Syria, c. sixty m. S of Damascus and thirty m. E of the Jordan. The site has ruins going back to Early Bronze times as well as a remarkable subterranean city of numerous streets, shops, rooms, and cisterns, prob. from the Hel. or Rom. period, in underlying caves in the basaltic rock (Unger’s Bible Dict., p. 287; HGHL, p. 576).

2. A fortified city allotted to Naphtali, near Kedesh in Upper Galilee (Josh 19:37), possibly modern Tell Khureibeh. It is prob. the i-t-r-', #91 in the campaign list of Thutmose III at Karnak (ANET, 242; Y. Aharoni, The Land of the Bible [1967], 150).