CABUL (Heb. Kābhūl; Flavius Josephus Χαβούλων or Χαβώλων). - A city of the tribe of Asher (Josh. 19:27) and a district of Galilee comprising twenty cities given by Solomon to Hiram as compensation (1 Kings 9:13).

The name of the city persists to our own day in the village of Kābhūl, 15 km southeast of Acre, and it appears that it once served to designate the surrounding region. In that case, in the Solomonic era Galilee, rather than being confined to the western zone of the lake of el-Hāleh, must have extended further south as far as the borders of Asher. The detail in 2 Chron. 8:2 (Hiram, on the contrary, hands over to Solomon that zone) is to be explained not as a whim of the chronicler based on Lev. 25:23 (the prohibition against ceding Hebrew territory to others), but by Hiram's displeasure with that district, considered "almost a nothing" (kābah); the Phoenician root χαβώλω is not to be found, which according to Flavius Josephus (Antiq. Jud., 8, 5, 3) would mean "disagreeable," in a play on words on the name Kābhūl. Solomon colonized the land restored to him with Hebrews, which shows that previously it was sparsely populated or inhabited by Canaanites, as the term "Galilee of the Gentiles" in Isa. 9:1 (8:23) likewise suggests.

Faustino Salvoni

@incollection{ec3_cabul_ebr_kabhul_flavio_giusep, author = {Salvoni, Faustino}, title = {Cabul (Ebr. KĀBhŪL; Flavio Giuseppe ΧΑΒΟΎΛΩΝ O ΧΑΒΏΛΩ)}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {III}, pages = {265--266}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1949}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/cabul-ebr-kabhul-flavio-giuseppe-khaboulon-o-khabolo} }

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