Habor

Habor (meaning a partaker or united stream) was a river or district in the Assyrian empire to which captive Israelites from the northern kingdom were deported following the fall of Samaria in 722 B.C. (2 Kings 17:6; 18:11; 1 Chr. 5:26). It is generally identified with the Khabur River, a major tributary of the upper Euphrates in what is now northeastern Syria, flowing through a fertile region that became a site of Israelite exile settlements.

The Khabur valley was strategically important in Mesopotamian geography and appears in Assyrian royal annals as a region of population transfers. The biblical references indicate that Israelites from the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh were settled there after the Assyrian campaigns, representing one of the earliest mass deportations of covenant people from their land—a pattern that would reach its culmination with Judah's Babylonian exile a century later.