The Western Shephelah Frontier Towns Near Lachish — Cabbon Lahmam and Chitlish

Joshua 15:40-41 names a tight cluster of farming villages in Judah's western Shephelah surrounding the heavily-fortified military stronghold of Lachish: "Cabbon, and Lahmam, and Kithlish, And Gederoth, Beth-dagon, and Naamah, and Makkedah." These were the small Iron Age settlements that filled the contested Judean-Philistine borderland — the inner foothills between the Judean highlands and the Philistine coastal plain. The cluster bore the brunt of repeated Philistine raids in the judges era, of Sennacherib's Assyrian sweep in 701 BCE, and of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian campaigns more than a century later.

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