Chephirim
Chephirim is an ancient city mentioned in the Old Testament, located in the region of Coastal Plain in modern-day Israel. Known today as Kafr Ana. It appears across 1 verse in Scripture.
Biblical History
Chephirim is an obscure settlement mentioned once in the Old Testament, appearing in 1 Esdras 5:19, a deuterocanonical parallel to the return-from-exile lists found in Ezra and Nehemiah. In this passage, Chephirim is listed among the towns whose inhabitants returned to Judah following the decree of Cyrus the Great. It appears to be an alternate form or variant spelling related to the more familiar Chephirah and its associated Benjaminite towns, though some scholars treat it as a distinct place. The return of exiles to their ancestral towns was a key theological theme of the restoration period, fulfilling prophetic promises that God would bring his people back to their land (cf. Jer 29:10). The specific mention of Chephirim in the census underscores that God's covenant faithfulness extended to even the smallest and least prominent communities within Israel, none of which was forgotten in the great act of national restoration.
Archaeological & Historical Notes
Chephirim is tentatively identified with Kafr Ana, a modern Arab village in the coastal plain of Israel near the city of Petah Tikva. The identification remains speculative, as the site appears only in the deuterocanonical text of 1 Esdras and has no clearly corresponding site in the canonical Ezra-Nehemiah lists. Surface surveys in the vicinity have found pottery from the Iron Age and Persian periods, consistent with the post-exilic context of the text. The broader Coastal Plain region shows considerable evidence of settlement continuity from the Bronze Age through the Persian and Hellenistic periods, as confirmed by numerous excavations at nearby sites.
Verse Appearances (1)
Neh
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]