Places of the Bible

Ophrah

first named in Joshua 18:23

Northern views. Village of Taiybeh [i.e., Taybeh], Ephraim 1900 · American Colony Photo Department / Matson Photo Service · Library of Congress, no known restrictions on publication

Where the name appears

Events told in passages that name Ophrah, 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 · 1 verse

What the spade found

Ophrah is generally identified with Et-Taiyiba. It has been surveyed but not excavated, and at its largest covered 2.5 hectares.

Occupation shows in 7 dated phases: Iron Age I, Iron Age IIa, Iron Age IIb-c, Iron Age III (Persian), 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 2 verses

Joshua: 18:23
1 Samuel: 13:17

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.