Tel-melah

Tel-melah ("mound of salt") was one of three Babylonian villages — alongside Tel-harsha and Cherub-addan-immer — whose Jewish inhabitants returned to Judah with Zerubbabel in 538 BCE but could not establish their Israelite genealogy (Ezra 2:59, Nehemiah 7:61). The name probably refers to one of the salt-marsh mounds in the alluvial flats of southern Babylonia where the Babylonian deportation policy had settled exilic communities. The 652 combined returnees were excluded from the priesthood pending Urim-and-Thummim resolution that never came. The chronicler preserved their names anyway, a quiet monument to the hidden cost of exile — not just lost geography, but lost identity.