Beersheba

The story

Beersheba is the capital of the Southern District, and is sometimes called the capital of the Negev. It is the ninth city in Israel by population, and its municipal area — 117,500 dunams — is the fourth largest in the country. It was declared a city in 1906, and it is the only city that was planned and founded by the Ottoman Empire in all four hundred years of its rule in the Land of Israel. But settlement here is far older: the first settlement was in the fourth millennium BCE, in three villages on the banks of Nahal Be'er Sheva, in which were found the earliest ivory works made in the Levant. In the Iron Age two settlements existed here — “Sheva” on the tel, and “Be'er Sheva” between the Bedouin market and the northern bank of the stream. The Bible links the name of the city to the well and to the oath sworn over it, once with Abraham and once with Isaac, and by virtue of the connection to the three patriarchs it is also called the City of the Patriarchs. In the Roman and Byzantine periods an army camp stood here and at least six churches around it; in the second half of the eighth century the city was abandoned, and it remained abandoned until about the year 1900. The Ottomans chose the location on the boundary between the three large Bedouin tribal confederations of the Negev, at a place where the groundwater is high. On 31 October 1917 it fell in the Battle of Beersheba to the forces of General Allenby; on 21 October 1948 the IDF entered it in Operation Moshe. From 1952 it was built according to the plan of Arieh Sharon, in neighborhoods each of which is gathered around a commercial center. Soroka was inaugurated in 1960, the university in 1970, and in the 1990s the city almost doubled itself with the immigration from the former Soviet Union.

• Biblical
• Chalcolithic period
• Ottoman
• 1917
• British Mandate
• 1948
• Bedouin
• Communities
• People
• Water and wells
• Beersheba