The siege of Jebus is described in passages of the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. '' Israelites Israelites were a Hebrew language, Hebrew-speaking ethnoreligious group, consisting of tribes that lived in Canaan during the Iron Age. Modern scholarship describes the Israelites as emerging from indigenous Canaanites, Canaanite populations ...

, led by King

David David (; , "beloved one") was a king of ancient Israel and Judah and the third king of the United Monarchy, according to the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament. The Tel Dan stele, an Aramaic-inscribed stone erected by a king of Aram-Dam ...

, besieged and conquered the

Canaan CanaanThe current scholarly edition of the Septuagint, Greek Old Testament spells the word without any accents, cf. Septuaginta : id est Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta LXX interprets. 2. ed. / recogn. et emendavit Robert Hanhart. Stuttgart : D ...

ite city of

Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...

, then known as ''Jebus'' (, , ). The Israelites gained access to the city by conducting a surprise assault, and Jebus (or Jerusalem) was subsequently installed as the capital city of the

United Kingdom of Israel The Kingdom of Israel (Hebrew: מַמְלֶכֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל‎, ''Mamleḵeṯ Yīśrāʾēl'') was an Israelite kingdom that may have existed in the Southern Levant. According to the Deuteronomistic history in the Hebrew Bible, ...

under its initial name as the City of David. The identification of Jebus with Jerusalem has been challenged. Danish biblical scholar

Niels Peter Lemche Niels Peter Lemche (born 6 September 1945) is a biblical scholar at the University of Copenhagen, whose interests include early Israel and its relationship with history, the Old Testament The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the ...

notes that every non-biblical mention of Jerusalem found in the

ancient Near East The ancient Near East was home to many cradles of civilization, spanning Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran (or Persia), Anatolia and the Armenian highlands, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula. As such, the fields of ancient Near East studies and Nea ...

refers to the city with the name of Jerusalem, offering as an example the Amarna letters, which are dated to the 14th century BCE and refer to Jerusalem as . He states that "There is no evidence of Jebus and the

Jebusites The Jebusites (; ) were, according to the Book of Joshua and Books of Samuel from the Hebrew Bible, a Canaanite tribe that inhabited Jerusalem, called Jebus () before the conquest initiated by Joshua (, ) and completed by David (). According to s ...

outside of the

Old Testament The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Isr ...

. Some scholars reckon Jebus to be a different place from Jerusalem; other scholars prefer to see the name of Jebus as a kind of pseudo-ethnic name without any historical background".

Biblical description

The capture of Jebus is mentioned in and with similar wordings:

Archeological evidence

A 10-years study with Carbon 14 confirmed that the City of David was the City of Jebus, in the south-east region of the odiern Jerusalem, which is the most ancient area of the Israel's capital.

References

{{The Bible and warfare Jebus David Jebus Land of Israel Jebus Jebus Jebusites

Biblical description

Archeological evidence

See also

References