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48-669: Afula's ancient tell suggests habitation from the Late Chalcolithic period to the Ayyubid period. It has been proposed that Afula is the location of the village Arbela mentioned in the Onomasticon of Eusebius and the 7th century Samaritan village of Kirjath Ophlatha . A fortress was built at the site during the Mamluk period. A small Palestinian Arab village during the Ottoman period; it

96-716: A "founder" of biblical archaeology , and he influenced much of future archaeological field work. Examples of his finds in Jerusalem include the Siloam tunnel and Robinson's Arch in the Old City ; the latter was named in his honor. The two men returned to Ottoman Palestine in 1852 for further investigations. In 1856, the enlarged edition of Biblical Researches was published simultaneously in English and German. Among those who later acknowledged Robinson’s stature, in 1941 G. Ernest Wright, reviewing

144-605: A farm. His father was a minister in the Congregational Church of the town for four decades. Robinson taught at schools in East Haven and Farmington in 1810–11 to earn money for college. He attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York , where his maternal uncle, Seth Norton, was a professor. He graduated in 1816. In 1821, he went to Andover, Massachusetts , where he published his translation of books i–ix, xviii and xix of

192-463: A mixed city, but rather a Jewish city, and it's their right. This is not racism." In June 2019, a demonstration happened in protest against a house being sold to an Arab family, joined by Afula's mayor, Avi Elkabetz, who had run for office on a platform of "preserving the Jewish character of Afula." Afula has a mediterranean climate ( Köppen climate classification : Csa ). The average annual temperature

240-446: A result of the attack. On 28 July, a rocket landed causing a fire. The rocket carried 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of explosives. In September 2016, it was announced that seven new neighborhoods would be built, doubling the city's population. In June 2018, 150 of the city's Jewish residents protested against the sale of a home to an Arab family. Former Afula Mayor Avi Elkabetz joined the protest and said, "the residents of Afula don't want

288-531: A rich archaeological heritage of eneolithic (4900–3800 BCE ) tells from the 5th millennium BCE. In Neolithic Greece there is a contrast between the northern Thessalian plain, where rainfall was sufficient to permit densely populated settlements based on dry-farming , and the more dispersed sites in southern Greece, such as the Peloponesus , where early villages sprang up around the smaller arable tracts close to springs, lakes, and marshes. Two models account for

336-507: A similar manner in 1909 or 1910, when Yehoshua Hankin bought 10,000 dunams (10 km) of land on which Merhavia and Tel Adashim were to be built (this was Hankin's first major purchase in the Jezreel Valley). In 1924 former leaders of Hashomer established an arms factory in Afula. Disguised as a farm equipment repair workshop it produced bullets and weapon parts. By the 1931 census ,

384-559: A student population of 3,814 and 12 high schools with 4,874 students. 52.3% of 12th grade students were entitled to a matriculation certificate in 2001. HaEmek Medical Center in Afula was the first regional hospital in Israel. The ancient mound of ʿAfula, known as Tell ʿAfula, is close to the city center, west of Route 60 and south of Ussishkin Street. Very little of the initial six-acre tell remains due to construction work done in this area since

432-433: Is 20.4 °C (68.7 °F), and around 468 mm (18.43 in) of precipitation falls annually. The Alon Tavor Industrial Zone is located northeast of Afula off Highway 65 . The Tadiran air conditioner factory is located there. Two Israeli plastics manufacturers, Keter Plastic and StarPlast , are also based there. According to CBS , there are 24 schools and 8,688 students in the city: 16 elementary schools with

480-578: Is first attested in English in an 1840 report in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society . It is derived from the Arabic تَلّ ( tall ) meaning "mound" or "hillock". Variant spellings include tall , tel , til and tal . The Arabic word has many cognates in other Semitic languages , such as Akkadian tīlu(m) , Ugaritic tl and Hebrew tel ( תל ). The Akkadian form

528-512: Is possibly the place ʿOphlah , mentioned in the lists of Pharaoh Thutmose III . Zev Vilnay suggested to identify Afula with biblical Ophel , mentioned in 2 Kings . With the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel , the area continued to be inhabited, and excavations have revealed artifacts from the periods of Persian and Roman rule. It may be identified with Arbela mentioned in the Onomasticon of Eusebius . Claude Reignier Conder suggested that ʿAfula

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576-460: Is similar to Sumerian DUL , which can also refer to a pile of any material, such as grain, but it is not known whether the similarity reflects a borrowing from that language or if the Sumerian term itself was a loanword from an earlier Semitic substrate language . If Akkadian tīlu is related to another word in that language, til'u , meaning "woman's breast", there exists a similar term in

624-510: Is thought that the earliest examples of tells are in the Jordan Valley , such as at the 10-meter-high mound, dating back to the proto-Neolithic period , at Jericho in the West Bank . More than 5,000 tells have been detected in the area of ancient Israel and Jordan. Of these, Paul Lapp calculated in the 1960s that 98% had yet to be touched by archaeologists. In Syria, tells are abundant in

672-558: The Iliad . There he aided Moses Stuart in the preparation of the second edition (1823) of the latter's Hebrew Grammar. He translated into English (1825) Wahl's Clavis Philologica Novi Testamenti . Robinson went to Europe to study ancient languages, largely in Halle and Berlin (1826–30). While in Halle, in 1828 he married German writer Therese Albertine Luise von Jakob . After the couple returned to

720-711: The Afula mall bombing on 19 May 2003, a woman suicide bomber blew herself up at the Amakim mall, killing three and wounding 70. This attack was claimed by the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine and the Fatah movement's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades . On 17 July 2006, during the 2006 Lebanon War , Hezbollah fired Katyusha rockets at ʿAfula, one of the southernmost rocket attacks on Israel from Lebanon. Six people were treated for shock as

768-738: The British Mandate period. The southern peak of the mound is the better preserved part. It was once widely considered to be the biblical site of Ophrah , the hometown of the judge Gideon , but contemporary scholars generally disagree with this supposition. Archaeological finds date from the Chalcolithic through the Byzantine period, followed by remains from the Crusader and Mamluk periods. The first excavations at Tell ʿAfula, carried out in 1948, found Late Chalcolithic–Early Bronze Age remains. Tombs from

816-512: The Jezreel Valley Railway after 1948 restored service to Haifa , but only until 1949 when it was abandoned. In 2011 construction began on a large-scale project to build a new standard gauge railway from Haifa to Beit She'an with stations in Afula and other towns, along roughly the same route as the historic valley railway. Israel Railways began passenger service on the new railway on October 16, 2016. Due to Afula's proximity to

864-465: The Liga Leumit . The main football club, Hapoel Afula , won Liga Alef in the 2012–13 season and is currently playing at Liga Leumit . Tell (archaeology) In archaeology , a tell (from Arabic : تَلّ , tall , 'mound' or 'small hill') is an artificial topographical feature, a mound consisting of the accumulated and stratified debris of a succession of consecutive settlements at

912-880: The Southern Levant , Anatolia and Iran , which had more continuous settlement. Eurasian tells date to the Neolithic , the Chalcolithic and the Bronze and Iron Ages. In the Southern Levant the time of the tells ended with the conquest by Alexander the Great , which ushered in the Hellenistic period with its own, different settlement-building patterns. Many tells across the Near East continue to be occupied and used today. The word tell

960-660: The Upper Mesopotamia region, scattered along the Euphrates , including Tell al-'Abr , Tell Bazi , Tell Kabir, Tell Mresh, Tell Saghir and Tell Banat . The last is thought to be the site of the oldest war memorial (known as the White Monument ), dating from the 3rd millennium BCE. Tells can be found in Europe in countries such as Spain, Hungary, Romania , Bulgaria, North Macedonia , and Greece . Northeastern Bulgaria has

1008-574: The West Bank , it has been a target for Palestinian political violence . On 6 April 1994, the Afula Bus suicide bombing killed five people in the center of Afula. In the Afula axe attack in November 1994, a 19-year-old female soldier was attacked and murdered by an axe-wielding Arab Hamas member. ʿAfula also was the target of a suicide attack on a bus on 5 March 2002, in which one person died and several others were injured at ʿAfula's central bus station. In

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1056-482: The well , which Guérin thought was probably ancient, he noticed several broken sarcophagi serving as troughs . In 1882, the Palestine Exploration Fund 's Survey of Western Palestine described El ʿAfula as a small adobe village in the plain, supplied by two wells. A population list from about 1887 showed that el ʿAfula had about 630 inhabitants, all Muslim. Gottlieb Schumacher , as part of surveying for

1104-651: The 1990s, several small excavations unearthed an uninterrupted sequence of settlement remains from the Chalcolithic until the Late Byzantine periods as well as remains from the Mamluk period. In 2012, excavations were conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority on the southern peak of Tell ʿAfula where the Crusader-Mamluk fortress is located. Due to construction activity from the 1950s, settlement layers on

1152-618: The Christians were Orthodox, while one was Melkite . In 1925, the area was acquired by the American Zionist Commonwealth as part of the Sursock Purchase . A quarter of the one hundred Arab families who had lived in the area accepted compensation for their land and left voluntarily; the remainder were evicted by the new owners. Jews began settling in ʿAfula shortly after as the town developed. Nearby land had been purchased in

1200-588: The Crusader fortress at Sepphoris . In 1321, ʿAfula was mentioned under the name of Afel by Marino Sanuto the Elder . A map by Pierre Jacotin from Napoleon's invasion of 1799 showed this place, named as Afouleh in a French transliteration of the Arabic. In 1816, James Silk Buckingham passed by and described Affouli as being built on rising ground, and containing only a few dwellings. He noted several other nearby settlements in sight, all populated by Muslims. In 1838, Edward Robinson described both ʿAfula and

1248-593: The Early Bronze Age, Middle Bronze Age II, Late Bronze Age–Iron Age I and Roman period were discovered near the municipal water tower. Archaeologists discovered the Crusader-Mamluk fortress on the southern peak of the tell, a Byzantine olive oil press and evidence of an Early Bronze Age settlement near the northern peak. In 1950–1951, excavations on the northwestern slope of the peak revealed a pottery workshop for Tell el-Yahudiyeh Ware from Middle Bronze Age II and another pottery workshop from Middle Bronze Age I. From

1296-826: The South Semitic classical Ethiopian language of Geʽez , namely təla , "breast". Hebrew tel first appears in the biblical book of Deuteronomy 13:16 (c. 700–500 BCE), describing a heap or small mound and appearing in the books of Joshua and Jeremiah with the same meaning. There are lexically unrelated equivalents for this geophysical concept of a town-mound in other Southwest Asian languages, including kom in Egyptian Arabic , tepe or tappeh ( Turkish / Persian : تپه ), hüyük or höyük (Turkish) and chogha (Persian: چغا , from Turkish çokmak and derivatives çoka etc.). Equivalent words for town-mound often appear in place names, and

1344-708: The United States and Germany, centers of biblical scholarship and exploration of the Bible as history . He translated scriptural works from classical languages as well as German translations. His Greek and English Lexicon of the New Testament (1836; last revision, 1850) became a standard authority in the United States and was reprinted several times in Great Britain. Robinson was born in Southington, Connecticut , and raised on

1392-521: The United States, Robinson was appointed professor extraordinary of sacred literature at Andover Theological Seminary (1830–1833). Robinson founded the Biblical Repository (1831), which he edited for four years. In 1836, Robinson published both a translation of Wilhelm Gesenius ' Hebrew Lexicon and a Greek New Testament Lexicon. He established the Bibliotheca Sacra (1843), into which

1440-463: The adjacent El Fuleh as "deserted". William McClure Thomson , in a book published in 1859, noted that ʿAfula and the adjacent El Fuleh were "both now deserted, though both were inhabited twenty-five years ago when I first passed this way." Thomson blamed their desertion on the bedouin . In 1875 Victor Guérin described ʿAfula as a village on a small hill overlooking a little plain. The houses were built of adobe and various other materials. Around

1488-630: The advance of General Edmund Allenby 's British forces into Ottoman Palestine, al ʿAfulah was captured by the 4th Cavalry Division of the Desert Mounted Corps , during the cavalry phase of the Battle of Sharon in September 1918. According to the British Mandate 's 1922 census of Palestine , Affuleh had 563 inhabitants; 471 Muslims, 62 Christians, 28 Jews and 2 followers of the Baháʼí Faith ; 61 of

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1536-446: The community was served by the Jezreel Valley Railway , a side branch of the larger Hejaz Railway . Since 1913 it had also been the terminus station of the branch connecting it to Jenin and later also to Nablus . Sabotage actions of Jewish underground militias in 1945 , 1946 and shortly before the 1948 Arab–Israeli War rendered first the connection to Jenin, then progressively the entire Valley Railway, inoperable . Repairs to

1584-630: The company of Eli Smith . He published Biblical Researches in Palestine in 1841, for which he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1842. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1847. Together with Smith, Robinson made scores of identifications of ancient places referenced the Bible. His work established his enduring reputation as

1632-541: The connection to Jenin being completed in 1913. During World War I , ʿAfulah was a major communications hub. In 1917, when Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen from the British intelligence established contact with the Nili Jewish spy network in Palestine, a German Jewish doctor stationed at al ʿAfulah railway junction provided the British with valuable reconnaissance reports on Ottoman and German troop movements southwards. With

1680-523: The construction of the Jezreel Valley railway , noted in 1900 that it consisted of 50-55 huts and had 200 inhabitants. North of the village was a grain stop, belonging to the Sursocks . In 1904 the Ottoman authorities inaugurated the Jezreel Valley railway , at first operating between Haifa and Beysan via ʿAfula and soon extended to Dera'a . Work eventually continued with an extension towards Jerusalem,

1728-468: The heart of modern ʿAfula, suggests almost continuous habitation from the Late Chalcolithic ( fourth millennium BC E) to the Ayyubid period in the 13th century. At the beginning of the twentieth century the mound served as a refuse dump for the nearby Arab village of el-Fuleh . For archaeological finds from Tell ʿAfula predating the Crusader/Mamluk fortress, see the archaeology paragraph. ʿAfula

1776-432: The limited geographical area they occur in. Tells are formed from a variety of remains, including organic and cultural refuse, collapsed mudbricks and other building materials, water-laid sediments, residues of biogenic and geochemical processes and aeolian sediment . A classic tell looks like a low, truncated cone with sloping sides and a flat, mesa -like top. They can be more than 43 m (141 ft) high. It

1824-440: The local names for tell sites in these regions of Greece. Edward Robinson (scholar) Edward Robinson (April 10, 1794 – January 27, 1863) was an American biblical scholar known for his magnum opus, Biblical Researches in Palestine , the first major work in biblical geography and biblical archaeology , which earned him the epithets "Father of Biblical Geography" and "Founder of Modern Palestinology." He studied in

1872-536: The population had increased to 874; with 786 Jews, 86 Muslims, nine Christians, and three classified as "no religion", in a total of 236 houses. In a 1945 survey the population of ʿAfula was estimated as 2300 Jews and ten Muslims. The town had a total of 18,277 dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey. Of this, 145 dunams of land was used to cultivate citrus and bananas, 347 dunams were for plantations and irrigable land, 15,103 for cereals, while 992 dunams were built-up land. During this time,

1920-539: The same site, the refuse of generations of people who built and inhabited them and natural sediment. Tells are most commonly associated with the ancient Near East but are also found elsewhere, such as in Southern and parts of Central Europe , from Greece and Bulgaria to Hungary and Spain , and in North Africa . Within the Near East they are concentrated in less arid regions, including Upper Mesopotamia ,

1968-566: The status of a city . The 1990s saw Jewish immigration from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union contribute to the growth of the city. Since 1995, the city has almost doubled its population. The name follows that of the small Arab village which occupied the site until World War I, possibly originating in the Canaanite-Hebrew root ʿofel "fortress tower", or the Arab word for "ruptured". An ancient mound or tell known as Tell ʿAfula, located in

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2016-515: The tell may have been destroyed. Only meager remnants were found, indicative of a settlement from Early Bronze Age I and the Roman period. Pottery from Early Bronze Age III, Iron Age I and a single Hellenistic Attic fragment indicate settlement on the tell in these periods. Fragments of glazed bowls from the thirteenth century (Mamluk period) were found along the southern edge of the excavation. The city's basketball club, Hapoel Afula , currently play in

2064-471: The tell structures of this part of southern Europe, one developed by Paul Halstead and the other by John Chapman. Chapman envisaged the tell as witness to a nucleated communal society , whereas Halstead emphasized the idea that they arose as individual household structures. Thessalian tells often reflect small hamlets with a population of around 40–80. The Toumbas of Macedonia and the Magoulas of Thessaly are

2112-438: The word "tell" itself is one of the most common prefixes for Palestinian toponyms . The Arabic word khirbet , also spelled khirbat ( خربة ), meaning "ruin", also occurs in the names of many archaeological tells, such as Khirbet et-Tell (roughly meaning "heap of ruins"). A tell can form only if natural and man-made material accumulates faster than it is removed by erosion and human-caused truncation , which explains

2160-493: Was identical with Kirjath Ophlathah , a place inhabited by Samaritans in the 7th century. At the centre of Tell ʿAfula stand the remains of a 19-metre square fortress from the Mamluk period, possibly first built during the Crusader period. The lower four courses are made of rough boulders, while the top remaining layer is made of reused Roman sarcophagi . The wall is a total of 5.5 meters tall. Pottery remains indicate that it

2208-592: Was merged the Biblical Repository . He spent three years in Boston working on a lexicon of scriptural Greek. Illness caused him to move to New York City . He was appointed as professor of biblical literature at Union Theological Seminary , serving from 1837 until his death. At the Union Theological Seminary, he served as the first librarian of the Burke Library . Robinson traveled to Palestine in 1838 in

2256-466: Was occupied in the twelfth and thirteenth century. The gate is dated based on pottery findings to the Mamluk period (13th–14th centuries CE), but so far (after the June 2017 campaign) it could not be determined when fortress itself was built, since it is perfectly possible that just the gate was renovated in the Mamluk period; the square shape and the use of Roman sarcophagi as building stones is closely resembling

2304-588: Was sold in 1872 with the entire Jezreel valley to the Lebanese Sursock family . In 1925, the same area was acquired by the American Zionist Commonwealth as part of the Sursock Purchase . The majority Muslim and Christian population were removed, and replaced by Jewish immigrants , marking the foundation of modern Afula. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Afula was settled by Jewish immigrants from Iraq , Yemen and Romania . In 1972, it gained

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