Places of the Bible
Aroer
A city in the south of Judah · City
Where the name appears
Events told in passages that name Aroer, and how many of their verses do. That is not the same as saying they happened here: a place can be named as a landmark, as somewhere being travelled to, or as the subject of a prophecy.
- Reign of Saul · 1094 BC · 1 verse
What the spade found
Aroer is generally identified with Aroer, a tell — a mound raised by one settlement built on the ruins of the last. It has been surveyed but not excavated, and at its largest covered 2.02 hectares.
Occupation shows in 4 dated phases: Iron Age IIb, Iron Age IIc, Early Roman, Late Roman.
The excavation is from the survey dataset From Villages to Empires (Zanoni and others, 2025), used under CC BY 4.0. The identification is the one modern scholarship settles on, compiled by OpenBible.info from over seventy works, also under CC BY 4.0. Identifying a mound with a biblical name is a scholarly judgement, and for some places it is still debated.
Easton’s Bible Dictionary
A city in the south of Judah, 12 miles south-east of Beersheba, to which David sent presents after recovering the spoil from the Amalekites at Ziklag (1 Sam. 30:26, 28). It was the native city of two of David’s warriors (1 Chr. 11:44). It is now called Ar’arah.
From M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1893), in the public domain.
Named in 1 verse
- 1 Samuel
- 30:28
The place, its people and its events come from Theographic, a knowledge graph of the Bible by Robert Rouse, used and shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.