Jabneel

Jabneel ("God builds") was a town on the northern border of Judah's inheritance just east of the Mediterranean coast, between Mount Baalah and Shikkeron and the Great Sea (Joshua 15:11). It later became the Hellenistic-Roman city of Jamnia (Yavneh), one of the principal cities of the southern coastal plain. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Jamnia became the center of post-temple rabbinic Judaism, where Yochanan ben Zakkai and his successors reorganized Jewish religious life around Torah study without the temple — establishing what would become the rabbinic tradition that survived to modern times. A separate Jabneel in the territory of Naphtali (Joshua 19:33) lay near Heleph on the western border of that tribe in lower Galilee. The Judean Jabneel is securely identified with modern Yavneh near Tel Aviv.