Leb-qamai
Leb-qamai is a region mentioned in the Old Testament, located in the region of Mesopotamia in modern-day Iraq. Known today as Tell el Muqayyar. It appears across 1 verse in Scripture.
Biblical History
Leb-qamai appears in Jeremiah 51:1, where the prophet declares, 'Thus says the Lord: Behold, I will stir up the spirit of a destroyer against Babylon, against the inhabitants of Leb-qamai.' The term is an atbash cipher, a Hebrew cryptographic device in which letters are substituted by their reverse-alphabet equivalents. When decoded, Leb-qamai yields 'Kasdim,' the Hebrew word for Chaldeans, referring to the Babylonian people. Jeremiah employs this literary technique in his extended oracle of judgment against Babylon (Jeremiah 50-51), which prophesies the fall of the great empire that had destroyed Jerusalem and carried Judah into exile. The use of a coded name may reflect the dangerous political context in which Jeremiah wrote, or it may serve as a literary device emphasizing the prophetic mystery of God's judgment. The oracle promises that God will avenge His people and repay Babylon for its violence against Zion. Leb-qamai thus represents Babylon as the object of divine retribution, a theme that echoes through to Revelation's fall of 'Babylon the Great.'
Archaeological & Historical Notes
Since Leb-qamai is a cipher for the Chaldeans (Babylonians), it refers broadly to the region of southern Mesopotamia in modern-day Iraq. The heartland of the Chaldean people centered around cities like Ur and Babylon in the alluvial plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Tell el-Muqayyar, the site of ancient Ur, has been extensively excavated, most famously by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s-1930s, revealing the Royal Tombs, ziggurats, and rich material culture spanning millennia. The broader Babylonian region contains numerous excavated sites including Babylon itself, Borsippa, and Nippur. These excavations have confirmed the wealth and power of the civilization that Jeremiah prophesied would fall.
Verse Appearances (1)
Jer
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]