Thelme
Thelme is an ancient city mentioned in the Bible, located in the region of Mesopotamia in modern-day Iraq. Known today as Samawah.
Biblical History
Thelme is an obscure biblical place name that does not appear prominently in the canonical Hebrew scriptures but is attested in certain textual traditions and deuterocanonical literature. It is associated with the broader world of Mesopotamian geography, placed in the region corresponding to the lower Tigris-Euphrates valley. Ancient Mesopotamia was a land crosscut by rivers, canals, and ancient settlement mounds, many of which preserved names from the deep Sumerian past. Settlements in this region played roles in the biblical narrative through the Babylonian exile, when Jewish communities were resettled across the Mesopotamian heartland following Nebuchadnezzar's deportations of 597 and 586 BC. The lower Euphrates region, where the modern Iraqi city of Samawah is located, formed part of this landscape of exile. Communities in such areas appear in the post-exilic census lists of Ezra and Nehemiah as places from which returning exiles came, though many specific settlement names were preserved only imperfectly in the biblical text's transmission.
Archaeological & Historical Notes
Thelme is tentatively associated with the region of Samawah in the lower Euphrates valley of modern Iraq, in the ancient land of Sumer. This area, near the ancient city of Nippur, has yielded rich archaeological evidence of continuous habitation from the Ubaid period through the Islamic era. Excavations at nearby sites have uncovered cuneiform tablets documenting Babylonian administrative records, including evidence of exiled Jewish communities living and working in the region during the 6th and 5th centuries BC. The broader area around Samawah preserves numerous ancient tells representing buried cities of Mesopotamian antiquity. The specific identification of Thelme with a known ruin mound has not been established definitively by modern scholarship.
Verse Appearances (0)
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]