Luz
Luz is an ancient city mentioned in the Old Testament, located in the region of Samaria in modern-day Israel. Known today as Luweizeh. It appears across 1 verse in Scripture.
Biblical History
This Luz refers to a separate city from the more famous Luz-Bethel, mentioned in Judges 1:26. When the tribe of Joseph (Ephraim and Manasseh) captured the original city of Luz (later renamed Bethel), they spared a man who showed them the entrance to the city. This man subsequently traveled to the land of the Hittites, where he built a new city and named it Luz after his former home. The narrative is notable for several reasons: it demonstrates the practice of city-founding by displaced individuals in the ancient Near East, it illustrates the Israelite policy of showing mercy to those who aided their military campaigns, and it preserves a tradition about the spread of Canaanite culture into Hittite territory. The story also reflects the incomplete nature of the Israelite conquest, as the spared inhabitant represents continuity with pre-Israelite Canaan transplanted to a new location. The second Luz disappears from the biblical record after this single mention, its later history unknown to the scriptural authors.
Archaeological & Historical Notes
The identification of this second Luz remains highly uncertain. The reference to "the land of the Hittites" in Judges 1:26 suggests a location in northern Syria or southern Anatolia, where Hittite cultural influence persisted after the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1180 BCE through the Neo-Hittite states. The proposed identification with Luweizeh, a site in the central hill country near Bethel, is problematic since the biblical text explicitly places this Luz in Hittite territory far from Canaan. Some scholars have suggested Khirbet Luweizeh near the Lebanese border as an alternative. No definitive archaeological evidence has confirmed the site, and it remains one of the more enigmatic geographical references in the book of Judges.
Verse Appearances (1)
Judg
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]