Places of the Bible
Geba
The hill · City
Where the name appears
Events told in passages that name Geba, 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.
- Reign of Saul · 1094 BC · 1 verse
- Reign of Asa · 954 BC · 1 verse
- Prophecies of Isaiah · 758 BC · 1 verse
- Reign of Josiah · 640 BC · 1 verse
- Prophecies of Zechariah · 519 BC · 1 verse
What the spade found
Geba is generally identified with Jaba, 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 hectares.
Occupation shows in 5 dated phases: Iron Age I, Iron Age II, 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
The hill, (2 Sam. 5:25 [1 Chr. 14:16, “Gibeon”]; 2 Kings 23:8; Neh. 11:31), a Levitical city of Benjamin (1 Kings 15:22; 1 Sam. 13:16; 14:5, wrongly “Gibeah” in the A.V.), on the north border of Judah near Gibeah (Isa. 10:29; Josh. 18:24, 28). “From Geba to Beersheba” expressed the whole extent of the kingdom of Judah, just as “from Dan to Beersheba” described the whole length of Palestine (2 Kings 23:8). It has been identified with Gaba (Josh. 18:24; Ezra 2:26; Neh. 7:30), now Jeb’a, about 5 1/2 miles north of Jerusalem.
From M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1893), in the public domain.
Named in 14 verses
- Joshua
- 18:24, 21:17
- 1 Samuel
- 13:3
- 1 Kings
- 15:22
- 2 Kings
- 23:8
- 1 Chronicles
- 6:60, 8:6
- 2 Chronicles
- 16:6
- Ezra
- 2:26
- Nehemiah
- 7:30, 11:31, 12:29
- Isaiah
- 10:29
- Zechariah
- 14:10
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.