Kedesh (alternate spellings: Qedesh, Cadesh, Cydessa) was an ancient Canaanite and later Israelite settlement in Upper Galilee, mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible. Its remains are located in Tel Kedesh, northeast of the modern Kibbutz Malkiya in Israel on the Israeli-Lebanese border.Negev & Gibson, eds. (2001), p. 278.
The settlement is first documented in the Book of Joshua as a Canaanite citadel conquered by the Israelites and designated as a Levitical city and City of Refuge. Jewish tradition holds that Deborah, Barak and Jael were buried near Kedesh.
In the 8th century BCE, it was captured by Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria and its inhabitants deported. During the 5th century BCE, it possibly became the capital of the Achaemenid province of Upper Galilee. In the Hellenistic period, Kedesh was the site of battles involving Jonathan Apphus and Seleucid king Demetrius II. In the Roman period, Josephus records Jewish attacks on Kedesh during the First Jewish–Roman War, with Titus establishing a camp there. The site was later mentioned in Eusebius. Excavations from 1997 to 2012 revealed significant Persian and Hellenistic administrative buildings and a large Roman temple complex.
As Qadas (also Cadasa; ), it was a Palestinian village located 17 kilometers northeast of Safad that was depopulated during the 1947–1949 Palestine war. One of seven villages populated by Shia Muslims, called the Metawalis, that fell within the boundaries of British Mandate Palestine, Qadas is today known as the tell of the ancient biblical city of Kedesh.; The village of Qadas contained many natural springs which served as the village water supply and a Roman temple dating back to the 2nd century.
History Early Bronze Age In EB II (c. 3050/3000–2900 BCE), Tel Qadesh (50 ha) was one of the largest sites in this part of the Levant with a complex fortification system.Wachtel, I., & Davidovich, U. (2021). Qedesh in the Galilee: The Emergence of an Early Bronze Age Levantine Megasite. Journal of Field Archaeology, 46(4), 260–274. https://doi.org/10.1080/00934690.2021.1901025Wachtel, I. (2023). The role of highland regions in interregional connectivity: Upper Galilee in the Early Bronze Age. Levant, 55(1), 6–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/00758914.2023.2184030 It was a regional hub with pottery belonging to the South Levantine Metallic Ware (SLMW).
Iron Age Kedesh Naphtali was first documented in the Book of Joshua as a Canaanite citadel conquered by the Israelites under the leadership of Joshua.Al-Ya'qubi quoted in le Strange, 1890, p.467. Ownership of Kedesh was turned over by lot to the Tribe of Naphtali and subsequently, at the command of God, Kedesh was set apart by Joshua as a Levitical city and one of the Cities of Refuge along with Shechem and Kiriath Arba (Hebron) ().
According to Jewish tradition, Deborah the prophetess, Barak the son of Abinoam and Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, as also Heber, were buried near the spring beneath the town of Kedesh.Burial Places of the Fathers, published by Yehuda Levi Nahum in , Tel-Aviv 1986, p. 248
Assyrian period In the 8th century BCE, during the reign of Pekah, king of Northern Israel, Tiglath-Pileser III of the Neo-Assyrian Empire took Kedesh and deported its inhabitants to Assyria. ()
Persian period Later, during the 5th century BCE, Kedesh may have become the capital for the Achaemenid-controlled and Tyrian-administered province of the Upper Galilee.Berlin, Andrea and Herbert, Sharon (2005). "Life and Death on the Israel-Lebanon Border". Biblical Archaeology Review 31 (5), 34-43.
Under Persian rule, the site was home to a monumental administrative compound dated to approximately 500 BCE, operating on behalf of the Tyrian royal house. Vessels suitable for agricultural goods are predominant, indicating that the site was concerned with the storage and management of produce. Among the findings from the Persian period is a clay bulla that preserves an impression made by a stamp seal bearing a Neo-Babylonian style motif closely paralleled by seals used in Nippur in the late 5th-century BCE. Petrographic analysis demonstrates that the clay of the bulla comes from the area of Kedesh, indicating that the sealing took place locally and that papyrus scrolls were used at the site.
Hellenistic period In 259 BCE, Kedesh was mentioned by Zenon of Kaunos, a traveling merchant from Ptolemaic Egypt,Papyrus Cairo Zenon I 59.004 in the Zenon Papyri.
The Persian-period administrative compound remained in use into the Hellenistic period, both under Ptolemaic and Seleucid control; in the first half of the 2nd century BC, the Seleucids used it for archiving documents, as the Persians had done before them. Remains from the Hellenistic period include Phoenician amphriskoi recovered from the archive complex. Organic residue analysis has identified their contents as cedar oil derived from Lebanese cedars, mixed with aromatic resin. Cedar oil is known to have been used in this period for the preservation of papyri.
According to 1 Maccabees, a battle between Hasmonean leader Jonathan Apphus and the Seleucid emperor Demetrius II Nicator took place in Kedesh.Antiquities of the Jews 13.154–62; The Wars of the Jews 2.459, 4.104.1 Maccabees 11:63–74 (text) Between 145 BCE and 143 BCE, Kedesh (Cades) was overthrown by Jonathan Maccabeus in his fight against Seleucid king Demetrius II Nicator.
Roman period According to Josephus, after the Jerusalem riots of 66, the Jews attacked a series of gentile cities, including Cydessa (Kedesh), then a Tyrian village, now in Roman Syria. During the First Jewish–Roman War, Titus established his camp there before he departed for battle with John of Gischala.
From 1997 to 2012, Tel Kedesh was excavated by a team from the University of Michigan's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in conjunction with the University of Minnesota, focusing in 2010 and 2012 on the Persian and Hellenistic administrative building of enormous size and complexity. Its expensive decoration and the variety and quantity of artifacts have revealed a dominating administrative presence in the Kedesh valley and the Upper Galilee lasting nearly 350 years. A large Roman temple complex was built there.
Eusebius, writing about the place in his Onomasticon, says: "Kedesh. A priestly city in the inheritance of Naphtali. Previously it was a city of refuge 'in Galilee in the hill country of Naphtali.' The 'king of the Assyrians' destroyed it (2 Kings 15:29). This is (now) Kydissos (), twenty miles from Tyre near Paneas."Eusebius, Onomasticon - The Place Names of Divine Scripture, (ed.) R. Steven Notley & Ze'ev Safrai, Brill: Leiden 2005, pp. 111–112 (§601), note 601
Kedesh of Naphtali Identification of the biblical "Kedesh of Naphtali" (Judges 4:6, 10) has been the subject of archaeological and historical debate. While many hold the ancient site to be in Upper Galilee, near the Lebanese border, Israeli archaeologist, Yohanan Aharoni, held the view that it lay in Lower Galilee, near the Valley of Jezreel, at a site which bears the same name (now Khirbet Qadish).Meyers, E.M., Strange, J.F., and Groh, D.E., "The Meiron Excavation Project: Archaeological Survey in Galilee and Golan, 1976," in: Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (No. 230 - April 1978), p. 4, citing Aharoni, Y. (1976) "Upper Galilee," in vol. 2 of Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (ed. M. Avi-Yonah), Israel Exploration Society: Jerusalem. Some prominent archaeological publications have, therefore, listed the site as being east of the "Jabneel valley" in "Lower Galilee".Negev & Gibson, eds. (2001), p. 278 (s.v. Kedesh-Naphtali).
Excavation project at Tel Kedesh From 1997–2012, archaeological excavations were conducted at the Tel Kedesh site by Sharon Herbert and Andrea Berlin on behalf of the University of Michigan.Israel Antiquities Authority, Excavators and Excavations Permit for Year 2010, Survey Permit # G-36The Story of a Site and a Project: Excavating Tel Kedesh, published in Archaeology (Volume 65 Number 3, May/June 2012): Archaeological Institute of America The excavations revealed an enormous Persian-Hellenistic administrative building built in the later sixth century BC. Over the next 350 years, this complex provided a stage for interactions between imperial powers, provincial administrators and local elites – as control shifted from the Achaemenid Persians, to the Ptolemies of Egypt, and then the Seleucids of Syria.
Middle Ages
Under the rule of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate in the 10th century CE, Qadas was a town in Jund al-Urrdun ("District of Jordan").Al-Ya'qubi quoted in le Strange, 1890, p.39. According to al-Muqaddasi in 985, "Qadas was a small town on the slope of the mountain. It is 'full of good things'. Jabal Amilah is the district which is in its neighborhood. The town possesses three springs from which the people drink, and they have a bath below the city. The mosque is in the market, and in its court is a palm tree. The climate of this place is very hot. Near Qadas is the (Hulah) Lake."Muqaddasi, 1886, p. 28Muqaddasi quoted in le Strange, 1890, p.468
Ishtori Haparchi, visiting the holy sites in the early fourteenth-century wrote of Kedesh: "About half a day's distance southward of Paneas, known in Arabic as Banias, is Kedesh, in the mountain of Naphtali, and it is [now] called Qades."Ishtori Haparchi, Sefer Kaftor Ve'ferah (vol. 2), ed. Avraham Yosef Havatzelet, Jerusalem 2007, (chapter 11) p. 53 (Hebrew). The editor (ibid.), note 8, makes note of the fact that the site is mentioned in Joshua 20:7, but that today it is called Tell Kedesh, located at grid reference 200 / 285.
Ottoman era In 1517, Palestine was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire and in the 1596 tax records, the village appeared as Qadas, under the nahiya ("subdistrict") of Tibnin, under Sanjak Safad, with a population of 49 households and 9 bachelors, (an estimated population of 319 people), all Muslim. They paid a fixed tax-rate of 25% on various agricultural products, such as wheat, barley, olives, cotton, orchards, beehives, and goats, as well as a press that processed either grapes or olives; a total of 10,472 akçe.Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, 1977, p. 181. Quoted in Khalidi, 1992, p. 484Note that Rhode, 1979, p. 6 writes that the register that Hütteroth and Abdulfattah studied was not from 1595/6, but from 1548/9
Victor Guérin visited in 1875, and noted: "The village of this name, which has at most 300 inhabitants, occupies barely a third of a beautiful hill, formerly entirely covered with dwellings and surrounded by a wall built of dressed stones, of which only a few levelling are now visible. The houses of the village almost all contain ancient fragments from toppled buildings. In one, among others, I am shown, on a column, a sculpted head representing the figure of the sun with a crown of rays".Guérin, 1880, pp. 355-362; Conder and Kitchener, 1881, SWP I, p. 229 says Guerin "described the most important ruins there."
In 1881, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine (SWP), Qadas was described as a stone-built village, situated on a spur of a ridge. The population, which was estimated to be between 100 and 300, cultivated fig and olive trees.Conder and Kitchener, 1881, SWP I, p. 202. Quoted in Khalidi, 1992, p. 484 SWP also noted that the "Metawali" from Qadas went to nearby Al-Nabi Yusha' to venerate the name of Joshua.Conder and Kitchener, 1881, SWP I, p. 228
British Mandate era Qadas was a part of the French-controlled Lebanon until 1923, when the British Mandate of Palestine's borders were delineated to include it.
Rainfall and the abundance of springs allowed the village to develop a prosperous agricultural economy based on grain, fruit, and olives.Khalidi, 1992, p.484.