Nippur
An ancient city of central Babylonia. Tablets found there name the canal Kabaru, identified with the river Chebar beside which Ezekiel and other Judean exiles lived.
Nippur lay in central Babylonia, south-east of Babylon; its ruins are at Nuffar in Iraq. The Bible does not name the city. Ezekiel places himself and his fellow exiles “by the river Chebar”, at a settlement called Tel-abib (Ezekiel 1:1–3) (Ezekiel 3:15). A business archive of the fifth century BC, excavated at Nippur in 1893, records a delivery to be made at a canal called Kabaru (Murashû archive BE 9, no. 4, lines 8–9). Its first editor identified the canal with the Chebar and noted that many of the people named in the archive have Judean names (Murashû archive BE 9, pp. 27–28). Where Tel-abib itself lay is not known; the timeline places Ezekiel’s visions at Nippur as the nearest fixed point.
What happened here
- 593 BC to 571 BC, estimated dateEzekiel’s Visions among the Exiles
Among the deported Judeans in Babylonia the priest Ezekiel sees the glory of God, announces the fall of Jerusalem and then its restoration, in the visions of the dry bones and of a new temple.