What was Nablus called before it was Nablus?

West Bank · Palestinian city, Samaritan holy site

Shechem שְׁכֶם (Hebrew Bible, Bronze Age) → Sychar Συχάρ (New Testament era) → Flavia Neapolis (Rome, 72 CE) → Nablus نابلس (Arabic, from “Neapolis”)

“Nablus” is not an Arabic word. It is the Greek Neapolis, “new city,” worn smooth by Arabic pronunciation over thirteen centuries, a Roman city founded in 72 CE beside biblical Shechem, the oldest continuously named site in this history’s own text. Abraham camped there when he first entered the land. Jacob bought its ground for a hundred pieces of silver and buried his household’s foreign gods under its oak tree. Joseph’s bones were carried up from Egypt and interred there. Joshua gathered the tribes at Shechem to renew the covenant. Above the modern city, Mount Gerizim remains the holy mountain of the Samaritans, the small Israelite sect that never left the land and still keeps a Passover sacrifice there. Nablus today is a thoroughly Palestinian city of roughly 150,000 people, the commercial and, for long stretches, militant capital of the northern West Bank. Its name is a Roman receipt sitting on an Israelite foundation.

Where the name comes from

Shechem appears in the Torah as early as Genesis 33, where Jacob “arrived safely at the city of Shechem” and bought the plot where he pitched his tent. The city recurs through the patriarchal and conquest narratives: Joseph’s remains are buried “at Shechem in the tract of land that Jacob bought,” Joshua 24 records, and it is at Shechem that Joshua assembles all the tribes of Israel to renew the covenant before his death, the closing scene of the book. By the Roman period the town beside the ancient site was known as Sychar; the Gospel of John places Jesus resting at Jacob’s well near Sychar, “close to the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph.” After Rome crushed a Samaritan revolt, Emperor Vespasian founded a new colonia in 72 CE named Flavia Neapolis, “Flavian New City,” after his own family name. Arabic conquerors in the seventh century kept the Roman name rather than replacing it. Over centuries of local pronunciation, Neapolis became Nablus, the name it carries today.

The archaeology beneath the name

The mound of ancient Shechem, Tell Balata, sits inside modern Nablus and has been excavated since the early twentieth century, turning up Middle Bronze Age fortifications, temple remains, and city gates dating back roughly 3,700 years, among the oldest continuously identified urban sites tied to a specific biblical narrative anywhere in the region. The city the patriarchs walked into was already ancient when Abraham arrived. Above it, Mount Gerizim carries its own separate archaeological record: a Samaritan temple complex built there in the Persian or early Hellenistic period, rivaling Jerusalem’s Temple as the Samaritans’ own center of worship, was destroyed by the Hasmonean king John Hyrcanus around 111 BCE, a decisive break in Jewish-Samaritan relations that outlasted every empire that followed. Byzantine emperor Zeno built a church on the summit in the fifth century CE specifically to supplant the Samaritan sanctuary; Justinian fortified it further in the sixth. The mountain has been fought over in stone for more than two thousand years before either Rome or Islam touched it.

Who ruled it, and what happened to its holy sites

Byzantine Nablus was a Christian and Samaritan city with a substantial Jewish minority; a major Samaritan revolt against Byzantine rule in 484 CE was crushed, and another in 529 to 531 CE ended with the Samaritan population devastated and their sacred mountain permanently barred to them by imperial decree. The Arab conquest of 636 CE brought Islamic rule and the slow demographic transformation of the city over subsequent centuries; the Crusaders held it briefly as Neapolis in the twelfth century, building the first substantial mosque-turned-church-turned-mosque cycle that repeats across the region’s sacred architecture, before Saladin’s forces retook it in 1187. Mamluk and then Ottoman rule followed from the sixteenth century onward, during which Nablus became famous across the Levant for its olive oil soap industry, still branded “Nabulsi soap” today, and remained one of Ottoman Palestine’s largest interior towns, alongside Jerusalem and Hebron, throughout the nineteenth century. Under the British Mandate the city’s Arab population grew a documented 42 percent between 1922 and 1947, slower growth than nearby Jenin’s 78 percent but still substantial expansion inside a single generation of British administration.

Joseph’s Tomb and the Samaritans today

Two holy sites sit inside or beside the modern city and mark two very different living communities. Joseph’s Tomb, a traditional burial site inside Nablus itself, was a functioning Jewish pilgrimage site under Israeli administration after 1967; it was overrun and its structure burned by a Palestinian mob during the opening days of the Second Intifada in October 2000, an attack that took place while Israeli and Palestinian security coordination was still nominally in effect. It has since been rebuilt and is visited under IDF escort in tightly controlled nighttime convoys, itself a measure of how contested a single small building can remain. Above the city, the Samaritan community, a few hundred people who trace unbroken descent from the ancient Israelites of the northern kingdom and who still read a version of the Torah, keep their village at Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and hold their annual Passover sacrifice there in full view of visitors, one of the only pre-Rabbinic biblical sacrificial rites still performed on its original mountain anywhere in the world. A second, smaller Samaritan community lives in Holon, inside Israel proper, the split product of the twentieth century’s partition of the land they never left.

Nablus under the Palestinian Authority

Since the Oslo Accords, Nablus city proper sits in Area A, under full Palestinian Authority civil and security control, while parts of its rural periphery fall under Areas B and C. It became one of the most militant cities of the Second Intifada, home to the Balata refugee camp and repeated Israeli operations against armed cells operating out of the Old City’s narrow alleys; it has remained a recurring flashpoint in West Bank operations through the 2020s. The city today is overwhelmingly Palestinian, commercially significant as the West Bank’s largest urban economy after Hebron, and it hosts An-Najah National University, one of the largest Palestinian universities. None of that erases the older layer underneath it: a reader can walk from a Roman colonnade to a Bronze Age gate to a Samaritan altar without leaving the municipal boundary, which is the whole point of asking what a city was called before it had its current name.

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Sources

From The cities on the main site.