Yibna (
Arabic: يبنا; Jabneh or Jabneel in
Biblical times; Jamnia in
Roman times; Ibelin to the
Crusaders), or Tel Yavne, is an archaeological site and depopulated
Palestinian town. The ruins are located immediately southeast of the modern Israeli city of
Yavne.
The town had a population of 5,420 in 1948, located 15 kilometers southwest of
Ramla.[5] Yibna was taken by
Israeli forces on 4 June 1948, and was depopulated during the military assault and expulsion.[6]
It is a significant site for post-biblical Jewish history, as it was the location of the
Council of Jamnia, considered the birthplace of modern Rabbinic Judaism. It is also significant in the history of the
Crusades, as the location of the
House of Ibelin.
Name
In many English translations of the Bible, it is known as Yavne or Jabneh /ˈdʒæbnə/. During Greco-Roman times, it was known as Jamnia (
Ancient Greek: ἸαμνίαIamníā;
Latin: Iamnia); to the
Crusaders as
Ibelin; and before 1948, as Yibna. (
Arabic: يبنا)
History
Based on written sources and archaeology, the history of Yavneh/Jabneh/Yibna goes back to the
Iron Age and possibly to the
Bronze Age. The
Hebrew Bible mentions Yavneh repeatedly, as does
Josephus. For more see
Yavne.
Bronze and Iron Age
Salvage excavations carried out in 2001 by the
Israel Antiquities Authority uncovered several burials at the northern foot of the original tell. Most of the burials are dated to the later
Iron Age. One burial points to a late
Bronze Age occupation.
A large
Philistinefavissa (deposit of cultic artifacts) was discovered on Temple Hill.[8] Two excavation seasons in the 2000s led by Professor
Dan Bahat revealed some Iron Age remains.[citation needed] Pottery sherds of the Iron Age and Persian period were discovered at the surface of the tell.[9]
Roman period with Herodians
In Roman times, the city was known as Iamnia, also spelled Jamnia. It was bequeathed by
King Herod upon his death to his sister
Salome. Upon her death it passed to
Emperor Augustus, who managed it as a private
imperial estate, a status it was to maintain for at least a century.[10] After Salome's death, Iamnia came into the property of
Livia, the future Roman empress, and then to her son
Tiberius.[11]
During the
First Jewish–Roman War, when the Roman army had quelled the insurrection in
Galilee, the army then marched upon Iamnia and
Azotus, taking both towns and stationing garrisons within them.[12] According to rabbinic tradition, Rabbi
Yohanan ben Zakkai and his disciples were permitted to settle in Iamnia during the outbreak of the war, after Zakkai, realizing that
Jerusalem was about to fall, sneaked out of the city and asked
Vespasian, the commander of the besieging Roman forces, for the right to settle in Yavne and teach his disciples.[13][14] Upon the fall of Jerusalem, his school functioned as a re-establishment of the
Sanhedrin.[15]
Byzantine period
Byzantine period finds from excavations include an aqueduct east of the tell, and a kiln.[16][17] The world's largest wine factory from the Byzantine period has been uncovered by Israeli archaeologists, after a two-year excavation process; the importance of its wine was exemplified by its use by emperor Justin II in 566 at his table during his coronation feast.[18]
The geographer
al-Muqaddasi, writing around 985, said that "Yubna has a beautiful
mosque. From this place come the excellent figs known by the name of Damascene."[19] The geographer
Yaqut al-Hamawi wrote that in Yubna there was a tomb said to be that of
Abu Hurairah, a companion (
sahaba) of the Islamic prophet
Muhammad. The author of the Marasid also adds that tomb seen here is also said to be that of
Abd Allah ibn Abi Sarh, another companion of the Prophet.[19]
In 2007, remains ranging from the Early Islamic period until the British Mandate period were uncovered.[20] An additional kiln, and part of a commercial/industrial area were uncovered at the west of the tell in 2009.[21]
Crusader, Ayyubid and Mamluk periods
The
Crusaders called the city Ibelin and built a
castle there in 1141. Two excavation seasons led by Professor
Dan Bahat starting in 2005 revealed the main gate.[citation needed] Its namesake noble family, the
house of Ibelin, was important in the
Kingdom of Jerusalem and later in the
Kingdom of Cyprus. Salvage excavations at the west of the tell unearthed a stash of 53 Crusader coins of the 12th and 13th centuries.[21]
Ibelin was first sacked by
Saladin before his army was comprehensively routed at the
Battle of Montgisard in late 1177. In August 1187, it was retaken by Saladin and burned down, and ceased for some time to form part of the Crusaders' kingdom.[22] The Jewish traveler
Benjamin of Tudela (1130–1173) identified Jamnia (Jabneh) of classical writers with the Ibelin of the Crusades. He places the ancient city of Jamnia at three parasangs from
Jaffa and two from
Ashdod (Azotus).[23]
During the
Mamluk period (13th–16th centuries), Yibna was a key site along the Cairo—Damascus road, which served as a center for rural religious and economic life.[24] Ibelin's parish church was converted into a mosque, to which a minaret was added during the Mamluk period in 1337. The minaret survives until today, while the mosque (the former Crusader church) was blown up by the Israeli army in 1950.[7][25]
The
Mausoleum of Abu Huraira, a maqam (religious shrine), in Yibna was described as "one of the finest domed mausoleums in Palestine". The site has been considered by Muslims as the tomb of Abu Huraira since the 12th century. After Israel's capture of Yibna in 1948, the shrine was taken over by
Sephardic Jews who consider the tomb as the burial place of Rabbi
Gamaliel of Yavne.[26]
Ottoman period
Palestine became part of the
Ottoman Empire in 1517. In the 1596 Ottoman tax registers, it fell under the nahiya (subdistrict) of
Gaza, part of the liwa' (district) of
Gaza, with a population of 129 households, an estimated 710 persons, all Muslims. The villagers paid a fixed tax rate of 25% on a number of crops, including wheat, barley, summer crops,
sesame seeds and fruits, as well as goats, beehives and vineyards; a total of 34,000
akçe. Three quarters of the revenues went to a
waqf (religious endowment).[27]
An American missionary,
William Thomson, who visited Yibna in 1834, described it as a village on hill inhabited by 3,000 Muslims who worked in agriculture. He wrote that an inscription on the mosque indicated that it had been built in 1386, while
Denys Pringle indicates 1337 as the construction year of the minaret.[7][29][30] In 1838, Yibna was noted as a Muslim village in the Gaza district.[31]
An Ottoman village list from about 1870 found that Yibna had a population of 1,042 living in 348 houses, though this number only counted adult males.[32][33] In 1882, the
Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine described Yibna as a large village partly built of stone and situated on a hill. It had olive trees and corn to the north, and gardens nearby.[34]
In 1921, an elementary school for boys was founded in Yibna. By 1941-42 it had 445 students. A school for girls was founded in 1943, and by 1948 it had 44 students.[5]
In the
1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Yibna had a population of 1,791; all Muslims,[35] increasing in the
1931 census to 3,600, of whom all were Muslims except for seven Christians, two Jews and one
Baha'i, living in a total of 794 houses.[36]
In
1944-45, Yibna had a population of 5,400 Muslims and 20 Christians,[2] while the total land area was 59,554
dunams, according to an official land and population survey.[37]
In addition there were 1,500 nomads living around the village.[5] A total of 6,468 dunams of village land was used for citrus and bananas, 15,124 were used for cereals, 11,091 were irrigated or used for orchards, of which 25 were planted with olive trees,[5][38] while 127 dunams were classified as built-up areas.[39]
Yibna was in the territory allotted to the Jewish state under the 1947
UN Partition Plan.[40] In mid-March 1948, a contingent of Iraqi soldiers moved into the village. In a
Haganah response on March 30, two dozen villagers were killed.[citation needed] On April 21, the village commander was arrested by the British authorities for the drunken shooting of two Arabs.[41]
During the
1948 Arab-Israeli war, residents of
Zarnuqa sought refuge in Yibna, but left after Yibna's inhabitants accused them of being traitors.[42] On 27 May, following the fall of nearby
al-Qubayba and
Zarnuqa, most of the population of Yibna fled to
Isdud, but armed males were refused entry. On 5 June, when Israeli troops arrived, they found the village almost deserted apart from a few elderly people who were ordered to leave.[42]
After 1948, a number of Israeli villages were founded on Yibna's land:
Kfar HaNagid and
Beit Gamliel in 1949,
Ben Zakai in 1950,
Kfar Aviv (originally: "Kfar HaYeor") in 1951, and
Tzofiyya in 1955.[43] According to the historian
Walid Khalidi, a railroad crosses the village. The old mosque and minaret, together with a shrine can still be seen, and some of the old houses are inhabited by Jewish and Arab families.[citation needed]
Archaeological excavations have revealed that part of the pre-1948 Arab village at Yibna was built on top of a Byzantine-period cemetery and refuse pits.[44]
Cultural references
Palestinian artist
Sliman Mansour made Yibna the subject of one of his paintings. The work, named for the village, was one of a series of four on destroyed Palestinian villages that he produced in 1988 in order to resist the cancellation of Palestinian history; the others being
Yalo,
Imwas and
Bayt Dajan.[45]
The harbour of ancient Yavneh has been identified on the coast at Minet Rubin (Arabic) or Yavne-Yam (Hebrew), where excavations have revealed fortification going back to the
Bronze AgeHyksos.[9] It has been in use from the Middle Bronze Age until the 12th century CE, when it was abandoned.[46] For more see
Yavne-Yam.
^Ben-Israel, Uriah (1979). "Yavne". In Alon, David (ed.). Israel Guide - Sharon, Southern Coastal Plain and Northern Negev (A useful encyclopedia for the knowledge of the country) (in Hebrew). Vol. 6. Jerusalem:
Keter Publishing House. p. 132.
OCLC745203905.
^Fischer, Moshe and Taxel, Itamar.
"Ancient Yavneh: Its History and Archaeology", in Tel Aviv Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, December 2007, vol. 34: No 2, pp.204-284, 247
^[Raz Kletter, Irit Ziffer, Wolfgang Zwickel. "Yavneh I: The Excavation of the 'Temple Hill' Repository Pit and the Cult Stands." Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, Series Archaeologica (OBOSA), Book 30. Academic Press Fribourg, Switzerland (
ISBN978-3-7278-1667-3) and Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen (
ISBN978-3-525-54361-0). 2010. Pages 2-13 ]
^Deutscher Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas; Deutsches Evangelisches Institut für Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes (1878).
Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins. University of California. Leipzig : K. Baedeker.
^Ankori, 2006, p.
82: 'Another series of four works from 1988 relates explicitly to the lost homeland through the titles given to each work by the artist. Mansour named each composition (Yalo, Beit Dajan, Emmwas, Yibna) after a Palestinian village that had been destroyed by Israel since its establishment in 1948. Thus, art became a way of resisting the eradication of Palestinian history and geography,’.
Fischer, Moshe; Taxel, Itamar; Amit, David (2008). "Rural Settlement in the Vicinity of Yavneh in the Byzantine Period: A Religio-Archaeological Perspective". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 350 (350): 7–35.
doi:
10.1086/BASOR25609264.
JSTOR25609264.
S2CID163487105.
Negev, Avraham;
Gibson, S. (2001). "Jabneh; Jabneel; Jamnia (a)". Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land. New York and London: Continuum.
ISBN0-8264-1316-1.