Zephath

Zephath appears once in Scripture in the Judges 1 catalog of post-Joshua tribal conquests: "And Judah went with Simeon his brother, and they slew the Canaanites that inhabited Zephath, and utterly destroyed it. And the name of the city was called Hormah" (Judges 1:17). The renaming preserved the memory of Israel's herem ("devotion to destruction") of the site. The new name "Hormah" had earlier been applied to the same region after the Amalekite defeat of Israel's presumptuous attack against Moses's warning (Numbers 14:45). The site is identified with Tel Masos in the Beersheba basin of the Negev, where archaeological surveys have confirmed an Iron Age I destruction layer.