Sheba
Sheba 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 1 verse in Scripture.
Biblical History
Sheba as a city in the Negev appears in Joshua 19:2 within the list of towns allotted to the tribe of Simeon. The passage lists "Beer-sheba, Sheba, Moladah" among thirteen cities with their villages assigned to the Simeonites within Judah's territory. There is significant scholarly discussion about whether Sheba here represents a distinct settlement or is simply a component of the compound name Beer-sheba that was accidentally separated in transmission. The parallel passage in Joshua 15:26-28 lists the same territory for Judah without mentioning Sheba separately, and 1 Chronicles 4:28 likewise omits it, listing only Beer-sheba. If Sheba is indeed a separate settlement, it would have been a small town in the northern Negev near Beer-sheba, part of the network of Simeonite communities in the arid southern frontier. The Negev settlements served as Israel's southern boundary, with Beer-sheba frequently marking the proverbial limit of the land in the phrase "from Dan to Beer-sheba." Whether an independent town or a textual variant, Sheba's listing reinforces the thoroughness with which the Promised Land was distributed among the tribes according to divine allocation.
Archaeological & Historical Notes
If Sheba represents a settlement distinct from Beer-sheba, its location would likely be in the immediate vicinity of Tel Beer-sheva, the well-excavated site in the northern Negev. Tel Beer-sheva, identified with biblical Beer-sheba, was excavated by Yohanan Aharoni from 1969 to 1976 and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The excavations revealed a planned Israelite city from the Iron Age II period with a sophisticated water system, storehouses, and a horned altar. Numerous smaller sites in the Beer-sheba Valley have been identified through survey work, any of which could potentially represent the separate town of Sheba if it existed independently. The Negev has been the subject of extensive archaeological survey by Israeli institutions, documenting hundreds of settlement sites from various periods. The arid environment has aided preservation, making this one of the best-documented regions in biblical archaeology.
Verse Appearances (1)
Josh
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]