Bani Na'im

Bani Na'im () is a town in the southern West Bank located east of Hebron in the Hebron Governorate of Palestine. It is situated at a higher elevation than most localities in the area, with an altitude of . The town is best known as the burial place of Lot, a fact already mentioned around 400 CE, when it was known as 'Caphar Barucha'. Following the Muslim conquest, its name was eventually Arabicized as . The tomb of Lot was turned into a mosque during Islamic rule and remained so under Crusader rule. Later, the Arab tribe of Bani Nu'aym settled there, giving the town its current name, Bani Na'im, first used by Muslim scholar Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi in 1690.

During the late 1930s, the population took part in the Arab Revolt against the British Mandate. Following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the town came under Jordanian rule. Since the 1967 Six-Day War, Bani Na'im has been occupied by Israel; since 1995, it has been governed by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). In 2017 the town had a population of 24,628.

History

Byzantine period and association with Lot

Biblical scholar Edward Robinson identified the site with the Latin placename ''Caphar Barucha'' () mentioned by Jerome (fl. around 400) in connection with Abraham and Lot. Jerome wrote that Paula of Rome, departing from Hebron, stopped at the height of Caphar Barucha and looked upon the surrounding region, remembering Lot and his sin. According to Jerome, Abraham observed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah from that location.Robinson and Smith, 1841, vol 2, pp
187-9
/ref> The name Caphar Barucha sometimes appears in literature in the form Caparbaricha.

Euthymius the Great established a monastery at Caparbaricha in 422; it is likely the ruins at Ein el-Skhaniya.

Several Byzantine period stones that had been reused in later structures have been found in the village. One is embedded in the mosque's surrounding wall and bears a broken cross. The mosque has possibly replaced an earlier church.

Early Muslim to Mamluk periods

Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant, the name of the village eventually took the Arabic form , or in its vernacular form or . Ali of Herat passed through the village in 1173 CE, noting that it was near Hebron and the burial place of Lot. Along with the town of Dura, Kafr Burayk became a part of the waqf (endowment) for the Ibrahimi Mosque (Cave of the Patriarchs) in Hebron on orders from the Ayyubid ruler of Damascus, al-Mu'azzam Isa, on 2 May 1215. The 15th-century Muslim geographer al-Suyuti also acknowledged that Lot was buried in Kafr Burayk and that in a cave west of the village, beneath an old mosque, laid "sixty prophets of whom twenty were Apostles". He noted that Lot's tomb was a site of "visitation and veneration from ancient times, the men of the age succeeding those who have gone before".le Strange, 1890,
468

Ottoman period

Kafr Burayk was included in the Ottoman tax registers of 1596, where it was listed in the of Khalil (Hebron) of the of Quds (Jerusalem).Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, 1977, p. 124 It had a population of 42 Muslim households who paid a fixed tax rate of 25% on various agricultural products, including wheat, barley, vineyards or fruit trees, grape syrup or molasses, and goats or beehives; a total of 10,500 akçe. For much of the latter half of Ottoman rule, the village was under the administration of the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem.

The first known mention of the name 'Bani Na'im' was by the Muslim traveler Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi in 1690. He wrote that the village had been known as 'Kafr al-Barik' and "now it is called Qaryat Bani Nu'aym in a diminutive form". It received this name from the Bedouins of Banu Nu'aym, also referred to as the Bani Na'im, who settled there after migrating from the vicinity of Petra in the Transjordan. Until the end of the 19th century, the early Arabic name was still known by the residents, as mentioned by Western travelers.

The biblical scholar Edward Robinson visited Bani Na'im in 1838, noting that it was a village with a mosque, "lying on very high ground, to which the ascent is gradual on every side, forming a conspicuous object to all the region far and near". He noted that its homes were "built of large hewn stones" and that the inhabitants, like other peasants in the area, lived in the houses in autumn and winter and took up abode in tents and caves in the spring to tend their flocks and cultivate their grain fields.

When the French traveler Victor Guérin visited in 1860, he found the village almost deserted since the population had left to live in tents as nomads to avoid military conscription.Guérin (1869), pp
153
��157. ''Beni-Na'ïm est un village en ce moment presque entièrement désert, car la plupart des habitants ont quitté leurs masons pour aller vivre, sous la tente, de la vie nomade, et tâcher d'échapper ainsi à la loi du recrutement militaire.'' He found them living in a tent village one kilometer away, ready to flee to the desert if an attempt was made to enlist them. However, in 1874 the Palestine Exploration Fund's '' Survey of Western Palestine'' (SWP) described it as "a good-sized village" bordered by olive groves to the south and west with many structures built out of ancient materials. The residences there were mostly one-story stone cabins. In their second visit in 1881, the SWP described Bani Na'im as well-cultivated with abundant flocks that grazed in desert areas east of the town. The town was a major supplier of sand for the Hebron glass industry.

British Mandate

In 1924, under British Mandatory rule, the first government school in Bani Na'im was founded. It joined the 1936–39 Arab revolt as the site of a battle between the irregular Palestinian Arab forces of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni and the British Army. In December 1937, British forces ordered the demolition of a house whose owners were accused of involvement in an anti-British incident near the town. They fined Bani Na'im's (village headmen) 50 British pounds and ordered the residents to carry 200 kilograms of explosives to the building for its demolition and watch the explosion as a deterrent measure.

Palestinian Arab irregulars led by al-Husayni and his local deputy, Abd al-Halim Jawlani, battled the British Army in Bani Na'im in December 1938. According to British military accounts, a resident of Bani Na'im called for intervention when the rebels entered the town. Israeli scholar Hillel Cohen wrote that Fakhri Nashashibi, a political rival of al-Husayni, informed military authorities on three rebel units forcing Bani Na'im's largely pro-Nashashibi inhabitants to join the revolt. The British promptly confronted a force of 100 irregulars. With British Air Force assistance, al-Husayni's troops dispersed and fled east of Bani Na'im where they were pinned down. British forces killed 60 rebels and captured 15. One British soldier was killed.

1948 war and Jordanian annexation

In the wake of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and after the 1949 Armistice Agreements

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