northeast of Bayt Jibrin,[4] and was built upon a hilltop overlooking the Elah valley, straddling the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, and with its suburban ruin, Levantine Arabic: عيد الميا, romanized: ʿeyd el-Miye, lying directly below it.

Sedimentary layers of ruins from the old Canaanite and Israelite eras, mostly potsherds, are noticeable everywhere, although olive groves now grow atop of this hill, enclosed within stonewall enclosures.

esh-Sheikh Madkur (Palestine grid: 1503/1175) sits at an elevation of 434 metres (1,424 ft) above sea-level and is thought by modern historical geographers to be the "upper Adullam", based on its proximity to Kh.

"[8] The identification of the upper site with the biblical Adullam is still inconclusive, as archaeological evidence attesting to its Old Canaanite name has yet to be found.

Sixty toppled houses in the wadi formed a village that still existed in the Muslim period, as [proven by] the remains of a mosque there observed.

'Id el Minya, also known as 'Eid al-Miah (Palestine grid: 1504/1181), is the site recognised as Adullam proper,[10] being now a tell at the southern end of Wadi es-Sûr, an extension of the Elah valley.

The site was first recognised as the biblical Adullam by French archaeologist Clermont-Ganneau in 1871, based on its location, a close approximation of the name and the ceramic finds it yielded.

esh-Sheikh Madkour, if indeed it is the biblical Adullam, lies only 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) southwest of Timnah, a site mentioned in Genesis, ch.

[30] More than 400 years later, the scene of David's victory over Goliath in the Elah valley was within a short distance from Adullam, at that time a frontier village.

[2][3][34][35] According to Israeli historian N. Naʾaman, this was not a fortress in the real sense, but only a town inhabited by a civilian population, although it functioned as an administrative military center in which a garrison was stationed and food and armor stored.

The only record of Adullam for this time-period (c. 539–331 BCE) is taken from the Hebrew canonical books, specifically the account of Nehemiah who returned with the Jewish exiles from the Babylonian captivity, during the reign of Artaxerxes I.

In 163 BCE, it was in Adullam that Judas Maccabaeus, the principal leader of the Maccabean Revolt during a time of foreign dominion in the country, retired with his fighting men, after returning from war against the Idumaeans and the Seleucid general, Gorgias.

As late as the early 4th century CE, Adullam was described by Eusebius as being "a very large village about ten [Roman] miles east of Eleutheropolis.

An Ottoman tax ledger of 1596 lists ʻAyn al-Mayyā [sic] (Arabic: عين الميا) in the nahiya Ḫalīl (Hebron subdistrict), and where it is noted that it had thirty-six Muslim heads of households.

[49] The copyist of the same tax ledger had erroneously mistaken the Arabic dal in the document for a nun, and which name has since been corrected by historical geographers Yoel Elitzur and Toledano to read ʻA'ïd el-Miah (Arabic: عيد الميا), based on the entry's number of fiscal unit in the daftar and its corresponding place on Hütteroth's map.

[52] According to Conder, an ancient road, leading from Beit Sur to Isdud once passed through ʿAīd el Mâ (Adullam) and was still partially visible.

[53] French orientalist and archaeologist, Charles Clermont-Ganneau, visited the site in 1874 and wrote: "The place is absolutely uninhabited, except during the rainy season, when the herdsmen take shelter there for the night.

"[2] Scholars explain this as a case of 'popular etymology', where, in Palestinian toponyms, the original denotation of a town's name is often "re-interpreted" by its local population.

[55] In 1957, the establishment of the Adullam region (Hebrew: חבל עדולם) began, a settlement area comprising over 100,000 dunams (25,000 acres),[56] and bearing the name of the biblical city.