town or village

Hazor

• Today Tel Hazor

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Events

1. c. 733 BCTiglath-pileser III takes Hazor and Galilee and deports their people to Assyria

History

Hazor lies in Upper Galilee, north of the Sea of Galilee, beside the road from Egypt to Damascus. Its ruins are the largest Bronze Age city in the land: an upper mound of about 12 hectares and a lower city of about 70. A town stood here in the Early Bronze Age, and in the Middle Bronze Age Hazor became a great city; letters from the palace of Mari on the Euphrates, in the eighteenth century BC, name it and its king. In the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BC the king of Hazor writes to Pharaoh, and the king of Tyre complains that he has left his city and joined the Habiru.

Joshua tells how Jabin, king of Hazor, gathered the kings of the north against Israel. Joshua took the city, "for Hazor beforetime was the head of all those kingdoms", and burned it, the only one of those cities he burned. In Judges another Jabin reigns in Hazor, and his captain Sisera is defeated by Deborah and Barak. Excavators found the Late Bronze city destroyed by a great fire in the thirteenth century BC. Yigael Yadin and Amnon Ben-Tor link the fire with the Israelites; others think of strife within the city, the Sea Peoples or the general collapse at the end of the Bronze Age.

1 Kings names Hazor among the cities Solomon built. A six-chambered gate and casemate wall on the upper mound, like those of Megiddo and Gezer, are dated by many to the tenth century BC and by others to the ninth. Later the Israelite town cut a great shaft down to the water table. In the days of Pekah, king of Israel, Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria took Hazor and carried its people captive to Assyria; excavators found the city of that time, 732 BC, burned.

Afterwards only small forts stood on the mound. In the second century BC Jonathan the Maccabee fought the army of Demetrius in the plain of Hazor, as 1 Maccabees and Josephus tell. Josephus places Hazor above Lake Semechonitis, while Eusebius only assigns it to the lot of Naphtali and recalls that Joshua burned it and the king of Assyria destroyed it. No later town is known on the site.

Scripture: Josh 11:1–5; Josh 11:10–13; Judg 4:2; Judg 4:23–24; 1 Kgs 9:15; 2 Kgs 15:29

Checked against its sources; not yet read by a historian.

Verses (11)

Josh 11:1

And it came to pass, when Jabin king of Hazor had heard those things, that he sent to Jobab king of Madon, and to the king of Shimron, and to the king of Achshaph,

Josh 11:10

And Joshua at that time turned back, and took Hazor, and smote the king thereof with the sword: for Hazor beforetime was the head of all those kingdoms.

Josh 11:11

And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them: there was not any left to breathe: and he burnt Hazor with fire.

Josh 11:13

But as for the cities that stood still in their strength, Israel burned none of them, save Hazor only; that did Joshua burn.

Josh 12:19

The king of Madon, one; the king of Hazor, one;

Josh 19:36

And Adamah, and Ramah, and Hazor,

Judg 4:2

And the LORD sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, that reigned in Hazor; the captain of whose host was Sisera, which dwelt in Harosheth of the Gentiles.

Judg 4:17

Howbeit Sisera fled away on his feet to the tent of Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite: for there was peace between Jabin the king of Hazor and the house of Heber the Kenite.

1 Sam 12:9

And when they forgat the LORD their God, he sold them into the hand of Sisera, captain of the host of Hazor, and into the hand of the Philistines, and into the hand of the king of Moab, and they fought against them.

1 Kgs 9:15

And this is the reason of the levy which king Solomon raised; for to build the house of the LORD, and his own house, and Millo, and the wall of Jerusalem, and Hazor, and Megiddo, and Gezer.

2 Kgs 15:29

In the days of Pekah king of Israel came Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, and took Ijon, and Abel-beth-maachah, and Janoah, and Kedesh, and Hazor, and Gilead, and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali, and carried them captive to Assyria.

King James Version

Tours through this place

• The conquest of Canaan →
• The fall of Israel →