Places of the Bible
Ibleam
City
Where the name appears
Events told in passages that name Ibleam, 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 Jehu · 885 BC · 1 verse
What the spade found
Ibleam is generally identified with Khirbet Bel'ameh, 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 9 hectares.
Occupation shows in 11 dated phases: Early Bronze Age I, Early Bronze Age II, Middle Bronze Age IIb, Late Bronze Age III, Iron Age I, Iron Age II, Iron Age III (Persian), Hellenistic, Byzantine, 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
People-waster, a city assigned to Manasseh (Josh. 17:11), from which the Israelites, however, could not expel the Canaanites (Judg. 1:27). It is also called Bileam (1 Chr. 6:70). It was probably the modern Jelamah, a village 2 1/2 miles north of Jenin.
From M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1893), in the public domain.
Named in 3 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.