Avva
Avva is an ancient city mentioned in the Old Testament, located in the region of Syria in modern-day Lebanon. Known today as Kafr Aya. It appears across 1 verse in Scripture.
Biblical History
Avva was a foreign city from which the Assyrian Empire relocated populations into the depopulated territory of Samaria following the conquest and deportation of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE. This policy of population transfer is recorded in 2 Kings 17:24, which states that the king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim and settled them in the cities of Samaria. These transplanted peoples brought their own gods and religious practices with them: the people of Avva are specifically noted in 2 Kings 17:31 as worshiping Nibhaz and Tartak, otherwise unknown deities. The result was the syncretic religious culture that the text describes with disapproval, these peoples feared the LORD while also serving their own gods, a practice denounced as incompatible with covenant faithfulness. This mixed population became the ancestral basis of the Samaritans of later biblical and Second Temple literature. Avva itself is located in the region of Syria or northern Mesopotamia, though its precise identification is uncertain. The episode illustrates Assyria's deliberate policy of ethno-religious displacement designed to prevent future rebellions by eliminating national and religious cohesion from conquered territories.
Archaeological & Historical Notes
The identification of biblical Avva with Kafr Aya in modern Lebanon, or alternatively with sites in northern Syria, remains tentative. The Assyrian deportation and resettlement policies described in 2 Kings 17 are well-attested in cuneiform royal annals, where Sargon II boasts of settling foreign populations in Samaria following its conquest. These Assyrian administrative records confirm the historical practice even where individual cities like Avva cannot be precisely pinpointed. Archaeological surveys of the Beqa'a Valley and northern Syria have identified sites with Assyrian period occupation. The deities Nibhaz and Tartak mentioned in connection with Avva remain unidentified in the broader ancient Near Eastern textual corpus.
Verse Appearances (1)
2Kgs
References
- Orr, J. (ed.) (1915) The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Chicago: Howard-Severance Company. [Public Domain]
- OpenBible.info (n.d.) Bible Geocoding. Available at: https://www.openbible.info/geo/. [CC BY 4.0]
- Bagnall, R. et al. (eds.) (n.d.) Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places. Available at: https://pleiades.stoa.org. [CC BY 3.0]
- Wikidata contributors (n.d.) Wikidata. Available at: https://www.wikidata.org. [CC0]
- Lawrence, D. et al. (2025) Villages to Empires: a settlement dataset for the Southern Levant. doi:10.5281/zenodo.15111732. [CC BY 4.0]
- Church of England (1769) The Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version. [Public Domain]