Kedesh (alternate spellings: Qedesh, Cadesh, Cydessa) was an ancient Canaanite and later Israelite settlement in Upper Galilee, mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible.

Its remains are located in Tel Kedesh, 3 km (1.9 mi) northeast of the modern Kibbutz Malkiya in Israel on the Israeli-Lebanese border.

As Qadas (also Cadasa; Arabic: قدس), it was a Palestinian village located 17 kilometers northeast of Safad that was depopulated during the 1947–1949 Palestine war.

[2][3] One of seven villages populated by Shia Muslims, called the Metawalis, that fell within the boundaries of British Mandate Palestine, Qadas is today known as the tell of the ancient biblical city of Kedesh.

In the 8th century BCE, during the reign of Pekah, king of Northern Israel, Tiglath-Pileser III of the Neo-Assyrian Empire took Kedesh and deported its inhabitants to Assyria.

[10][9] According to Josephus, after the Jerusalem riots of 66, the Jews attacked a series of gentile cities, including Cydessa (Kedesh), then a Tyrian village,[11] now in Roman Syria.

Its expensive decoration and the variety and quantity of artifacts have revealed a dominating administrative presence in the Kedesh valley and the Upper Galilee lasting nearly 350 years.

"[17] From 1997–2012, archaeological excavations were conducted at the Tel Kedesh site by Sharon Herbert and Andrea Berlin on behalf of the University of Michigan.

Over the next 350 years, this complex provided a stage for interactions between imperial powers, provincial administrators and local elites – as control shifted from the Achaemenid Persians, to the Ptolemies of Egypt, and then the Seleucids of Syria.

Under the rule of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate in the 10th century CE, Qadas was a town in Jund al-Urrdun ("District of Jordan").

[28][29] Victor Guérin visited in 1875, and noted: "The village of this name, which has at most 300 inhabitants, occupies barely a third of a beautiful hill, formerly entirely covered with dwellings and surrounded by a wall built of dressed stones, of which only a few levelling are now visible.

Rainfall and the abundance of springs allowed the village to develop a prosperous agricultural economy based on grain, fruit, and olives.

[33] In the 1931 census of Palestine, conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Qadas had a population of 273; 1 Christian and 272 Muslims, in a total of 56 houses.

[39] Team leader Raphael Greenberg noted that his project was unusual in its focus on Palestinian remains, contrary to the usual practice of digging around or through them to reach what is beneath.