CABUL (Hebrew Kábhál; Flavius Josephus xaβoúλov or xaβoúλov). — A city of the tribe of Asher (Jos. 19:27) and a district of Galilee comprising twenty cities given, as compensation, by Solomon to Hiram (1 Kings 9:13).
The name of the city has persisted to our own day in the village of Kábál, 15 km southeast of Acre, and it appears to have once served to designate the surrounding region. In that case, at the time of Solomon, Galilee rather than being confined to the western zone of Lake el-Hūleh must have extended further southward as far as the borders of Asher. The detail in 2 Chron. 8:2 (Hiram, on the contrary, delivers this zone to Solomon) is to be explained not as a whim of the chronicler based on Lev. 25:23 (prohibition against ceding Hebrew territory to others), but rather by Hiram’s displeasure with that district, considered “almost worthless” (kábal; Flavius Josephus xaβoúλov, which, according to Giovanni Giuseppe [Antiquitates Iudaicae, 8.5.3], would signify “displeasing”) through a play on the name Kábhál. Solomon colonized the land returned to the Hebrews, which shows that it had previously been sparsely populated or inhabited by Canaanites, as is also suggested by the term “Galilee of the Gentiles” in Isa. 9:1 (8:23).