place
Tel-melah
תֵּל מֶ֫לַח
Tel-melah, a Babylonian city from which some Jewish exiles returned to Jerusalem, but could not prove their genealogy (Ezra 2:59; Neh. 7:61).
- verses
- 2
- first named
- Ezra 2:59
- last named
- Nehemiah 7:61
- feature
- settlement
- coordinates
- 32.13°N · 45.23°E
Nippur (OpenBible)
The gazetteer records one identification, and no competing one.
Description
Tel-melah in the text
Tel-melah is mentioned in Ezra 2:59 and Nehemiah 7:61 as one of the Babylonian cities from which Jewish exiles returned to Jerusalem after the decree of Cyrus the Great. Along with the exiles from Tel-harsha and Cherub-addan-immer, those from Tel-melah were unable to prove their ancestry or demonstrate that they belonged to the people of Israel. This indicates that during the Babylonian captivity, some Jews may have lost track of their genealogical records or intermarried with non-Jewish populations. The exact location of Tel-melah is unknown, but it was likely situated in Babylonia, the region where the Jewish exiles had been deported. The name "Tel-melah" may be derived from the Akkadian language, meaning "mound of salt" or "hill of salt." The mention of Tel-melah in the context of the returning exiles underscores the challenges faced by some Jews in establishing their identity and lineage after the Babylonian exile.
Relations
Direct connections
Every entity the graph places in a stated relation with this one, grouped by the kind of link. Each relation is authored once and its inverse derived, so both ends always agree. Rows marked “registry” come from the identity spine rather than from a verse, and a row marked “which bearer is the source’s decision” is one where the name could have meant more than one person. The last group is not a relation at all — it counts the events two entities stand in together.
The pattern
Where Tel-melah is named
Every book of the corpus in the order it is read, each as wide as the chapters it holds. A bar is the verses of that book which write the name, and the flat stretches are as much of the answer as the bars.
2 verses across 2 of 66 books; 64 write the name nowhere. Named in Ezra (1) and Nehemiah (1).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — 2, across 2 books.
Onward
Where this page goes
Nothing in the graph stands one hop from this entity yet. These are the best-connected entities of the same type, so the page still ends somewhere. Descriptions by STEPBible TIPNR.
Sources