Keilah

Keilah was a city in the lowlands of the Kingdom of Judah, mentioned in the Book of Joshua among the cities of the Shephelah and in the Book of Nehemiah as a town resettled after the Babylonian captivity. The Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BCE already name it, under the form Qeilah, with its king Suwardata. In the First Book of Samuel, David saved its granaries from the Philistines and then left when he learned its people would hand him to Saul. The site is generally identified with Khirbet Qeyla, a ruin on a terraced hill beside the modern village of Qila near Hebron, covering about 50 dunams. Pottery shows almost continuous settlement from the Bronze Age to the Crusader and Mamluk periods.