Tel-abib

Tel-abib appears once in Scripture as the Judean exile community by the Kebar River where Ezekiel began his prophetic ministry: "Then I came to them of the captivity at Tel-abib, that dwelt by the river of Chebar, and I sat where they sat, and remained there astonished among them seven days" (Ezekiel 3:15). The name (literally "mound of the spring flood") referred to the Tell el-Abib ruins about fifty miles southeast of Babylon where Nebuchadnezzar had settled groups of deported Judeans on the irrigation canals of the Mesopotamian plain. The modern Israeli city of Tel Aviv takes its name from this site — adopted as the Hebrew title for Theodor Herzl's novel Altneuland.