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Places of the Bible

Carmel

City

Along the Mediterranean coast, southward. Haifa from Mt. Carmel showing the harbor
Along the Mediterranean coast, southward. Haifa from Mt. Carmel showing the harbor 1950 · American Colony Photo Department / Matson Photo Service · Library of Congress, no known restrictions on publication

Where the name appears

Events told in passages that name Carmel, 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.

A dot is a moment; a bar is something that lasted, drawn to its length. The fainter the mark, the fewer verses name the place.

  • War with Canaanites · 1450 BC · 1 verse
  • Reign of Saul · 1094 BC · 7 verses
  • Reign of David · 1054 BC · 3 verses
  • Prophecies of Amos · 787 BC · 2 verses
  • Prophecies of Isaiah · 758 BC · 2 verses
  • Prophecies of Nahum · 662 BC · 1 verse
  • Prophecies of Jeremiah · 627 BC · 2 verses

What the spade found

Carmel is generally identified with Kh. el-Karmil W. It has been surveyed but not excavated.

Occupation shows in 4 dated phases: Early Bronze Age IV/Middle Bronze Age I/Int. Bronze, Iron Age IIb-c, Roman, Byzantine.

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 town in the hill country of Judah (Josh. 15:55), the residence of Nabal (1 Sam. 25:2, 5, 7, 40), and the native place of Abigail, who became David’s wife (1 Sam. 27:3). Here king Uzziah had his vineyards (2 Chr. 26:10). The ruins of this town still remain under the name of Kurmul, about 10 miles south-south-east of Hebron, close to those of Maon.

From M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1893), in the public domain.

Named in 22 verses

Joshua
12:22, 15:55, 19:26
1 Samuel
15:12, 25:2, 25:5, 25:7, 25:40, 27:3, 30:5
2 Samuel
2:2, 3:3, 23:35
1 Chronicles
11:37
Song of Solomon
7:5
Isaiah
33:9, 35:2
Jeremiah
46:18, 50:19
Amos
1:2, 9:3
Nahum
1:4

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.