Zela
Zela is an ancient city mentioned in the Old Testament, located in the region of Judea in modern-day Israel. Known today as Khirbet Salah. It appears across 2 verses in Scripture.
Biblical History
Zela holds a particularly poignant place in the Old Testament narrative as the burial site of Saul, the first king of Israel, and his family. In 2 Samuel 21:14, following the gruesome episode in which seven of Saul's descendants were handed over to the Gibeonites, David arranged for the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan to be brought from Jabesh-gilead (where the men of Jabesh-gilead had retrieved them from the Philistines) and buried in the tomb of Kish, Saul's father, at Zela in the territory of Benjamin. This act of royal piety toward his predecessor, despite the years of conflict between David and Saul, signaled David's desire for national reconciliation and his respect for the house of his predecessor. The burial of Saul's family at Zela thus marked the formal close of a turbulent chapter in Israel's history. Zela also appears in Joshua 18:28 in the list of cities within the tribal allotment of Benjamin, confirming it as an established Benjaminite settlement. The tribe of Benjamin, as Saul's tribe of origin, gave the burial at Zela an appropriate dynastic and territorial logic.
Archaeological & Historical Notes
Zela is tentatively identified with Khirbet Salah, a ruin mound located northwest of Jerusalem in the Benjaminite highlands near the modern suburb of Giv'at Ze'ev. The site lies in a hilly terrain consistent with the Benjaminite tribal territory described in Joshua 18. While no dedicated excavations have been carried out at Khirbet Salah, surface surveys in the region have documented Iron Age remains, fitting the period of Saul and David. The proximity to Jerusalem, the capital David was consolidating at the time of the reburial narrative, would have made Zela a logical choice for the final resting place of the Saulide dynasty, close enough to the new center of power to be honored without threatening Davidic authority.
Verse Appearances (2)
Josh
2Sam
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]