Tel Abib (Hebrew:תל אביב,Tel Aviv, "the hill of Spring", fromAkkadianTel Abûbi, "The Tel of the flood") is an unidentifiedtell ("hill city") on theKebar Canal, nearNippur in what is now Iraq. Tel Abib is mentioned byEzekiel inEzekiel 3:15:
Then I came to them of the captivity at Tel Abib, that lived by the river Chebar, and to where they lived; and I sat there overwhelmed among them seven days.
The Kebar or Chebar Canal (or River) is the setting of several important scenes of theBook of Ezekiel, including theopening verses. The book refers to this river eight times in total.[1]
Some olderbiblical commentaries identified the Chebar with theKhabur River in what is nowSyria. The Khabur is mentioned in1 Chronicles 5:26 as the "Habor". However, more recent scholarship is agreed that the location of the Kebar Canal is nearNippur in Iraq.
Theka-ba-ru waterway (Akkadian) is mentioned among the 5th century BCEMurashu archives from Nippur.[2] It was part of a complex network ofirrigation and transport canals which also included theShatt el-Nil, a silted up canal toward the east of Babylon.[3][4]
It is not to be confused with the Kebar River in Iran, site ofKebar Dam, the oldest surviving arch dam.
Nahum Sokolow adopted the biblical place-name as the title for his Hebrew translation ofTheodor Herzl's 1902 novelAltneuland ("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 nearJaffa, which grew into the modernIsraeli city ofTel Aviv. TheHebrew letter ב withoutdagesh represents a sound like [v], but older English translations of theBible traditionally transcribe it as "b".