Kerioth

Kerioth ("cities," a plural) is named twice in the major prophetic oracles against Moab: "Judgment has come upon... Kerioth and Bozrah, and upon all the cities of the land of Moab" (Jeremiah 48:24); "Kerioth has been captured and the strongholds seized" (Jeremiah 48:41); "I will send a fire upon Moab, and it shall devour the strongholds of Kerioth, and Moab shall die amid uproar" (Amos 2:2). Mesha king of Moab also names Kerioth on the Moabite Stone, claiming to have dragged a sacred object of his god Chemosh "before the face of Kerioth." A second Kerioth was a town in southern Judah on the border with Edom (Joshua 15:25). Many scholars connect this Judean Kerioth with the surname Iscariot — "Ish Kerioth" meaning "man of Kerioth" — making Judas Iscariot the only one of the twelve disciples not from Galilee, an outsider from southern Judea. The traitor's origins, like Ahithophel's before him, would have come from the same hill country as David's.