CABUL (Heb. Kābhūl; Flavius Josephus χαβούλων or χαβώλω). - A city of the tribe of Asher (Josh. 19:27) and a district of Galilee comprising twenty cities given, as compensation, by Solomon to Hiram (I Kings 9:13).
The name of the city has endured to the present day in the village of Kābhūl, 15 km south-east of Acco, and it appears at one time to have served to designate the surrounding region. In that case, in the Solomonic period Galilee, rather than being limited to the area west of Lake el-Hāleh, must have extended farther south, as far as the borders of Asher. The detail in II Chron. 8:2 (Hiram, on the contrary, hands over this area to Solomon) is to be explained not as a whim of the chronicler based on Lev. 25:23 (the prohibition against transferring Hebrew territory to others), but by Hiram’s disappointment with that district, regarded as “almost nothing” (kābah); the Phoenician root χαβώλω, which according to Flavius Josephus (Antig. Jud., 8, 5, 3) would mean “unpleasant,” cannot be found and is a play on the name Kābhūl. Solomon colonized the land restored to him with Hebrews, which shows that previously it had been sparsely populated or inhabited by Canaanites, as is also suggested by the expression “Galilee of the Gentiles” in Is. 9:1 (8:23). Faustino Salvoni