al-Karmil () is a Palestinian village located twelve kilometers south of Hebron. The village is in the Hebron Governorate Southern West Bank, within Area A under total Palestinian control. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the village had a population of 9,740 in 2017. The primary health care facilities for the village are designated by the Ministry of Health as level 2.
History
German biblical archaeologist, A. E. Mader (German article), who surveyed Palestine in 1911–1914, saw the strategic importance of historical Carmel in the fact that it's situated at the point where the main road crossing the hill country from north to south is splitting here, one road continuing towards Beersheba, and the other leading east to the southern end of the Dead Sea. The Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) authors, Conder & Kitchener, managed to trace an ancient road from Jerusalem to "El Kŭrmŭl" in 1874.
Hebrew Bible: Carmel in Judah
There are three references to al-Karmil in the Hebrew Bible. "Carmel" is mentioned as a city of Judah, the place where Saul erects a monument after the expedition against the Amalekites, and where Nabal the Carmelite resides (, and ).
Late Roman and Byzantine periods
Eusebius' Onomasticon mentions a garrison stationed here at the beginning of the fourth century. Towards the end of the fourth century, already during the Byzantine period, the Notitia Dignitatum document mentions an Illyrian cavalry unit in the town of Chermula. The large, perfectly preserved ancient water reservoir is noticed by all 19th-century explorers. It and a good spring provided the town with plenty of water. A relief showing Hercules was discovered just north of the reservoir during the Mandatory period.
Although placed on three low hills and therefore hard to defend, the town was sufficiently effective as a bullwark against Bedouin raids. Mader noticed that to Eusebius it is a χώμη 'Ιουδαίων, a 'Jewish village', but the presence of at least three churches, including a large one that was part of a monastery located south of the town, all from the following two centuries, are proof that the village had strikingly become preeminently Christian during the Byzantine period.
A total of three Byzantine churches were confirmed by archaeologists in recent years in the western part of ancient Carmel: a community church in the centre, and another two on hills to the north and south. Mader was witness to the villagers of Yatta using the ruins as a source for cut stones for their houses, in one case repurposing half of an inscribed lintel from a Byzantine church.
In 1984, Avraham Negev [he], starting from "still insufficient" archaeological evidence and a thorough reassessment of ancient written sources, proposed that Eusebius, by naming the village associated in his time with biblical Carmel in two different ways, Chermala and Karmelos, did not make one of his known mistakes, but reflected the existence of two associated settlements. Negev suggests that "old Carmel" (al-Karmil) was garrisoned by the Romans only after the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135), at which point most of its Jewish inhabitants gradually left during the years 150–300. They moved away to a site little over two kilometres away, now known as Khirbet Susiya, where –according to Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, who adopted Negev's theory– they never stopped identifying as "Carmel". When Eusebius compiled his Onomasticon, the migration process had just ended. "Old Carmel"/Chermala, modern day's Khirbet al-Karmil, therefore had a successively biblical (Jewish)–Roman (pagan)–Christian history. Negev interprets two different dedicatory inscriptions from the synagogue of "new Carmel"/Karmelos/Kh. Susiya as indicating that those Jews who had remained in "old Carmel" used to come for Sabbath and holidays to pray in "new Carmel", which lay within the Sabbath limit of the old village. "New Carmel" prospered tremendously based on its trade in wine and oil with the Romans (this including the Christian Byzantine period), but after the Muslim conquest of the Levant and the withdrawal of their main customers, lost their source of income, in part due to the Muslim prohibition of consuming alcohol. The Jewish population eventually left, the name Carmel of the newer site was forgotten and eventually replaced with the Arabic Khirbet Susiya, "Ruin of the Liquorice Plant", after a common species growing there.