Khirbet Kheibar

Khirbet Kheibar is situated on a hill near the western outskirts of the Sanur Valley, immediately northeast of the Palestinian village of Meithalun. During the Middle Bronze Age, Khirbet Kheibar was a major city, and the nearby sites of El-Beiyadha and el-Mudawarra may had been its daughter-sites. == Visits, surveys and excavations ==

Victor Guérin visited the site in 1870, writing that “[...] on the foothills I found the remains of a wall built of large undressed boulders, which encircled the whole place. Inside it the slopes are all full with collapsed, small buildings, until three-quarters of the hill. Higher there is another wall of large undressed stones. Inside this there are rock-hewn cisterns, some collapsed structures and the foundations of a tower, 15 m long and 12 m wide.” W. F. Albright visited in 1925, and reported that the site only contained Roman, Byzantine, and Arab pottery, also adding that pre-Arab coins may have been discovered there. Gophna and Porath conducted a site survey In 1967. In a report published in 1972, they noted the wall and stated that the inside space measured 120 m by 80 m. Zertal visited the site in 1979 as part of the Manasseh Hill Country Survey. == In local folklore ==

A local tradition brought by the Survey of Western Palestine linked Khirbet Kheibar to “a Jewish King, who is said by the peasantry to have lived in Sanur. His daughter had her summer residence near the tell in Merj el-Ghuruk”. Ilan cited local traditions connecting the tell's name to the Jews of Kheibar in Hejaz (7th century). A similar tradition is held by the Makhamara family of Yatta, in the southern Hebron Hills, who has a long standing tradition of descending from the Jews of Kheibar. According to Breslavi, it is difficult to say with certainty that the site is connected to the immigration of Khaybar Jews to the Land of Israel. However, based on early Islamic Arab sources from the 7th up to the 9th century such as al-Waqidi which offer evidence that Jews expelled from Khaybar lived in Jericho, it is possible that some of them later migrated north to the area around Sanur and settled at the site. ==See also==