Suba, Jerusalem

Suba (صوبا) was a Palestinian Arab village west of Jerusalem that was depopulated and destroyed in 1948. The site of the village lies on the summit of a conical hill called Tel Tzova (תל צובה), or Jabal Suba, rising 769 meters above sea level, and it was built on the ruins of a Crusader castle. The place has been tentatively identified with a town mentioned in the Septuagint version of Joshua 15:59. The Septuagint gives a list of eleven towns, which is missing in the Masoretic text. One of them is given as Σωρης ('Sōrēs') in most manuscripts but as Εωβης ("Eobes") in the Codex Vaticanus. The original therefore might have been Σωβης ("Sōbes"). There has also been a tentative identification with Tzova or Zobah (Greek Σουβα, "Sūba") from the Books of Samuel ( and ), but several scholars consider the identification unfounded. Both the Greek and the Hebrew spellings correspond exactly to the Arabic name of Suba. ` Middle Bronze Age cairn-tombs were excavated in the neighborhood of the ruined Arab village, though the site itself has not yielded artifacts from before the late Iron Age. March 2000 excavations at a plastered cave on the grounds of Kibbutz Tzova identified it as the cave of John the Baptist. In the later Roman period, the site was possibly mentioned in rabbinical sources as Seboim. It has been suggested that Suba was Subahiet, one of 21 villages given by King Godfrey as a fief to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In 1114, the gift was re-confirmed by Baldwin I of Jerusalem. A "Brother William of Belmont" was mentioned in Crusader sources in the years 1157 and 1162, he might have been castellan at Belmont. Sometime before 1169, the Crusaders built a castle there called Belmont, run by the Hospitallers. In 1170 an unnamed castellan was mentioned. Today, parts of the northern and western Crusader wall remain, as well as ruins of a tower and other structures. These include large underground cisterns, some pre-dating the Crusader period. Belmont Castle was taken by Saladin in 1187.