Places of the Bible

Jezreel

first named in 2 Samuel 4:4

Where the name appears

Events told in passages that name Jezreel, 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 David · 1054 BC · 1 verse

What the spade found

Jezreel is generally identified with Tel Yizre'el, a tell — a mound raised by one settlement built on the ruins of the last. It has been excavated, and at its largest covered 6.5 hectares.

Occupation shows in 8 dated phases: Early Bronze Age III, Middle Bronze Age II-III, Late Bronze Age, Iron Age IIa, Iron Age IIc, 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.

Named in 1 verse

2 Samuel: 4:4

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.