Bible Location
Meaning: a city; wall; meeting · 5 cross references · Modern-day map available
Kir was a distant eastern place associated with Syria's origins and with Assyrian deportation. It is important because prophetic texts use it both as the place to which Arameans were exiled and as part of the larger story of the nations' movements under God. First appears in 2 Kgs 16:9.1
AI summary: Kir is one of those places whose importance comes from its role within imperial displacement. Kings and Amos connect it with the exile of the Syrians after the fall of Damascus, making it part of the geography of judgment and uprooting. Amos also looks back more deeply, linking the Arameans themselves with Kir as a place of origin, which gives the name an unusual sweep from beginnings to forced return. The cross references present Kir as a distant eastern location bound up with Syria's identity, conquest, and removal.1
A wall or fortress, a place to which Tiglath-pileser carried the Syrians captive after he had taken the city of Damascus (2 Kings 16:9; Amos 1:5; 9:7). Isaiah (22:6), who also was contemporary with these events, mentions it along with Elam. Some have supposed that Kir is a variant of Cush (Susiana), on the south of Elam. 3
AI-assisted summary prepared for ai-BIBLE and stored as page content, based on dictionary material, place metadata, and linked Bible cross references.
Alistair de Blacquiere-Clarkson, “ai-BIBLE Bible Names JSON Factsheet Aggregating Material from Smith’s Bible Dictionary & Hitcocks’s New and Complete Analysis of the Bible.” ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
M.G.Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary, ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
Robert Rouse, “Theographic Bible Information,” Theographic-Bible-Metadata, 2020, https://github.com/robertrouse/theographic-bible-metadata.