Places of the Bible
Chephirah
City · now Kirbat el Kafira
Where the name appears
Events told in passages that name Chephirah, 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.
- War with Canaanites · 1450 BC · 1 verse
What the spade found
Chephirah is generally identified with Kh. el-Kafira, 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 1.5 hectares.
Occupation shows in 5 dated phases: Iron Age I, Iron Age II, Iron Age III (Persian), Hellenistic-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
Village, one of the four cities of the Gibeonitish Hivites with whom Joshua made a league (9:17). It belonged to Benjamin. It has been identified with the modern Kefireh, on the west confines of Benjamin, about 2 miles west of Ajalon and 11 from Jerusalem.
From M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1893), in the public domain.
Named in 4 verses
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.