Where was Kadesh on the Orontes, where Egypt fought the Hittites?

Question

Accepted Answer

Kadesh is Tell Nebi Mend, a large mound on the Orontes river in western Syria, south-west of Homs and just south of the lake of Homs; the map point stands on it. It lies about 332 km north of Jerusalem and 118 km north of Damascus in a straight line. It is a different place from Kadesh-barnea in the desert south of Judah, about 477 km away, where Israel camped in the wilderness, and from Kedesh in Galilee. Kadesh commanded the valley between the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon, the road from Egypt and Canaan to the north, and its kings stood at the crossroads of empires. A king of Kadesh led the coalition that Thutmose III of Egypt defeated at Megiddo about 1457 BC. About 1274 BC Ramesses II marched on Kadesh and was ambushed by the Hittite king Muwatalli II below its walls; Ramesses had the battle carved on his temples as a victory, but Kadesh stayed in Hittite hands, and some sixteen years later Ramesses and Hattusili III made the peace treaty whose text survives in both Egyptian and Hittite. In Hellenistic times the town was called Laodicea; it was excavated by Maurice Pézard in 1921–1922 and by a British team under Peter Parr from 1975. The Bible does not name this Kadesh for certain. In the route of David's census the Hebrew and the King James Version read “Then they came to Gilead, and to the land of Tahtim-hodshi”, a phrase no one has explained; some Greek manuscripts read “the land of the Hittites, Kadesh”, and many scholars and some modern translations emend the verse to “Kadesh in the land of the Hittites”, which is why the map shows Kadesh at this verse. Others think the census did not reach so far north. Riblah, where Pharaoh Necho put King Jehoahaz in bonds and Nebuchadnezzar later judged Zedekiah, lies only about 12 km south of Kadesh on the same river.