Gib´eah. There were several places of this name, which, as before remarked [GEBA], is the feminine form of the word Gibeah, and signifies a hill. Without doubt all the places so named were situated upon hills.
1. Gibeah of Benjamin is historically the most important of the places bearing this name. It is often mentioned in Scripture. It was the scene of that abominable transaction which involved in its consequences almost the entire extirpation of the tribe of Benjamin (, sq.). It was the birth-place of Saul, and continued to be his residence after he became king (;;;; ); and here was the scene of Jonathan's romantic exploit against the Philistines (1 Samuel 14). It was doubtless on account of this its intimate connection with Saul, that the Gibeonites hanged up here his seven descendants (). Jerome speaks of Gibeah as, in his time, level with the ground, and since then it does not appear to have been visited by travelers till recently. Dr. Robinson, who made many valuable observations in this neighborhood, detected Gibeah in the small and half-ruined village of Jeba, which lies upon a low, conical, or rather round eminence, on the broad ridge which shelves down towards the Jordan valley, and spreads out below the village in a fine sloping plain. The views of the Dead Sea and the Jordan, and of the Eastern mountains, are here very extensive. Among the ruins some large hewn stones, indicating antiquity, are occasionally seen. This place is about five miles north by east from Jerusalem.
2. Gibeah in the mountains of Judah (). which, under the name of Gabaatha, Eusebius and Jerome place twelve Roman miles from Eleutheropolis, and state that the grave of the prophet Habakkuk was there to be seen. Dr. Robinson identifies it with the village of Jebah, which stands upon an isolated hill, in the midst of Wady-el-Musurr, about ten miles south-west of Jerusalem.
3. Gibeah in Mount Ephraim, called Gibeah of Phineas, where the high-priest Eleazar, son of Aaron, was buried by his son Phineas (). Dr. Robinson finds it in a narrow valley called Wady-el-Jib, the Geeb of Maundrell, lying just midway on the road between Jerusalem and Shechem.
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John Kitto was an English biblical scholar of Cornish descent.Born in Plymouth, John Kitto was a sickly child, son of a Cornish stonemason. The drunkenness of his father and the poverty of his family meant that much of his childhood was spent in the workhouse. He had no more than three years of erratic and interrupted education. At the age of twelve John Kitto fell on his head from a rooftop, and became totally and permanently deaf. As a young man he suffered further tragedies, disappointments and much loneliness. His height was 4 ft 8 in, and his accident left him with an impaired sense of balance. He found consolation in browsing at bookstalls and reading any books that came his way.
From these hardships he was rescued by friends who became aware of his mental abilities and encouraged him to write topical articles for local newspapers, arranging eventually for him to work as an assistant in a local library. Here he continued to educate himself.
One of his benefactors was the Exeter dentist Anthony Norris Groves, who in 1824 offered him employment as a dental assistant. Living with the Groves family, Kitto was profoundly influenced by the practical Christian faith of his employer. In 1829 he accompanied Groves on his pioneering mission to Baghdad and served as tutor to Groves's two sons. In 1833 Kitto returned to England via Constantinople, accompanied by another member of the Groves mission, Francis William Newman. Shortly afterwards he married, and in due course had several children.
A London publisher asked Kitto to write up his travel journals for a series of articles in the Penny Magazine, a publication read at that time by a million people in Britain, reprinted in America and translated into French, German and Dutch. Other writing projects followed as readers enquired about his experiences in the East amidst people living in circumstances closely resembling those of Bible times.
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