Places of the Bible
Gibeah
A hill or hill-town
Where the name appears
Events told in passages that name Gibeah, 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 · 10 verses
- Reign of David · 1054 BC · 2 verses
- Prophecies of Hosea · 784 BC · 3 verses
- Prophecies of Isaiah · 758 BC · 1 verse
What the spade found
Gibeah is generally identified with Tell el-Ful, a tell — a mound raised by one settlement built on the ruins of the last. It has been excavated, and at its largest covered 2 hectares.
Occupation shows in 6 dated phases: Middle Bronze Age, Iron Age I, Iron Age IIc, Iron Age III (Persian), 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 hill or hill-town, “of Benjamin” (1 Sam. 13:15), better known as “Gibeah of Saul” (11:4; Isa. 10:29). It was here that the terrible outrage was committed on the Levite’s concubine which led to the almost utter extirpation of the tribe of Benjamin (Judg. 19; 20), only six hundred men surviving after a succession of disastrous battles. This was the birthplace of Saul, and continued to be his residence after he became king (1 Sam. 10:26; 11:4; 15:34). It was reckoned among the ancient sanctuaries of Palestine (10:26; 15:34; 23:19; 26:1; 2 Sam. 21:6-10), and hence it is called “Gibeah of God” (1 Sam. 10:5, R.V. marg.). It has been identified with the modern Tell el-Ful (i.e., “hill of the bean”), about 3 miles north of Jerusalem.
From M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1893), in the public domain.
Named in 41 verses
- Joshua
- 18:28
- Judges
- 19:12, 19:13, 19:14, 19:15, 19:16, 20:4, 20:5, 20:9, 20:10, 20:13, 20:14, 20:15, 20:19, 20:20, 20:21, 20:25, 20:29, 20:30, 20:31, 20:34, 20:36, 20:37, 20:43
- 1 Samuel
- 10:26, 11:4, 13:2, 13:15, 14:2, 14:16, 15:34, 22:6, 23:19, 26:1
- 2 Samuel
- 21:6, 23:29
- 1 Chronicles
- 11:31
- Isaiah
- 10:29
- Hosea
- 5:8, 9:9, 10:9
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.