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Places of the Bible

Keilah

City · now Khirbet Qila

Where the name appears

Events told in passages that name Keilah, 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 Saul · 1094 BC · 12 verses

What the spade found

Keilah is generally identified with Kh. Qeila. It has been surveyed but not excavated.

Occupation shows in 5 dated phases: Middle Bronze Age II-III, Late Bronze Age, 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

Citadel, a city in the lowlands of Judah (Josh. 15:44). David rescued it from the attack of the Philistines (1 Sam. 23:1-8); but the inhabitants proving unfaithful to him, in that they sought to deliver him up to Saul (13), he and his men “departed from Keilah, and went whithersoever they could go.” They fled to the hill Hareth, about 3 miles to the east, and thence through Hebron to Ziph (q.v.). “And David was in the wilderness of Ziph, in a wood” (1 Sam. 23:15). Here Jonathan sought him out, “and strengthened his hand in God.” This was the last interview between David and Jonathan (23:16-18). It is the modern Khurbet Kila. Others identify it with Khuweilfeh, between Beit Jibrin (Eleutheropolis) and Beersheba, mentioned in the Amarna tablets.

From M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1893), in the public domain.

Named in 15 verses

Joshua
15:44
1 Samuel
23:1, 23:2, 23:3, 23:4, 23:5, 23:6, 23:7, 23:8, 23:10, 23:11, 23:12, 23:13
Nehemiah
3:17, 3:18

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.