Tel Abib (, Tel Aviv, "the hill of Spring", from Akkadian Tel Abûbi, "The Tel of the flood") is an unidentified tell ("hill city") on the Kebar Canal, near Nippur in what is now Iraq. Tel Abib is mentioned by Ezekiel in :
Location
The Kebar or Chebar Canal (or River) is the setting of several important scenes of the Book of Ezekiel, including the . The book refers to this river eight times in total.
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Some older biblical commentaries identified the Chebar with the Khabur River in what is now Syria. The Khabur is mentioned in as the "Habor". However, more recent scholarship is agreed that the location of the Kebar Canal is near Nippur in Iraq.
The ka-ba-ru waterway (Akkadian) is mentioned among the 5th century BCE Murashu family archives from Nippur. It was part of a complex network of Irrigation canal and transport canals which also included the Shatt en-Nil, a silted up canal toward the east of Babylon.
It is not to be confused with the Kebar River in Iran, site of Kebar Dam, the oldest surviving arch dam.
Legacy
Nahum Sokolow adopted the biblical place-name as the title for his Hebrew translation of
Theodor Herzl's 1902 novel
Altneuland ("Old New Land"), basing it on archaeologists' use of Arabic "tel" extracted from placenames to mean = "accumulated mound of debris" for "old", and "spring" (season) for "new", "renewal". Menachem Shenkin picked its name to mean a new Jewish village near
Jaffa, which grew into the modern
city of
Tel Aviv. The
Hebrew language letter ב without
dagesh represents a sound like v, but older English translations of the
Bible traditionally transcribe it as "b".
See also
-
Book of Ezekiel
-
Tell (archaeology)