Hazar-shual
Hazar-shual is an ancient city mentioned in the Old Testament, located in the region of Judea in modern-day Israel. Known today as Tel Beer Sheva. It appears across 4 verses in Scripture.
Biblical History
Hazar-shual, meaning "village of the jackal" or "enclosure of the fox," appears four times in the Old Testament, consistently in the context of the territorial boundaries of the southern tribes. In Joshua 15:28, it is listed among the cities of Judah in the Negev region near Beer-sheba. In Joshua 19:3, the same city is assigned to the tribe of Simeon, which had its allotment embedded within Judah's territory. This double listing reflects the historical reality of Simeonite absorption into Judah during the settlement period. In the post-exilic period, Hazar-shual reappears in Nehemiah 11:27 as one of the settlements inhabited by the people of Judah after the return from Babylonian captivity, demonstrating remarkable continuity of place-name usage across many centuries. The Negev location of Hazar-shual placed it within the pastoral zone south of Beer-sheba, a landscape suited for herding and seasonal agriculture, consistent with the kind of small agricultural settlements implied by the "hazar" (village or enclosure) designation. Its persistent appearance from the settlement period through the Second Temple era makes Hazar-shual a useful geographical anchor for understanding the long-term patterns of settlement in the southern Judean highlands.
Archaeological & Historical Notes
Like several neighboring Negev settlements, Hazar-shual is associated with the Beer-sheba basin, with its precise identification uncertain. Tel Beer Sheva has been extensively excavated and identified with the biblical Beer-sheba, while surrounding sites in the basin correspond to the cluster of Simeonite and Judahite settlements listed in Joshua 15 and 19. Archaeological survey in the northern Negev has revealed numerous Iron Age sites, small farmsteads, enclosures, and village clusters, consistent with the pattern of settlement suggested by the biblical city lists. The area shows occupation in the Iron Age I–II periods and again in the Persian period, aligning with the Nehemiah 11 reference to post-exilic resettlement.
Verse Appearances (4)
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]