Hazor was one of the largest and most important cities of ancient Canaan and played a prominent role in Joshua’s conquests. The site is in the extreme north of Israel in that finger of land that extends north between the Golan Heights and Lebanon. Hazor is really in two parts, as this view shows. The mound, or upper city (the bottle-shaped mound at left center, within the bend of the road) occupies about 30 acres, while the lower city, the great enclosure to the east (at center), covers fully 175 acres. Hazor first appears in Egyptian execration texts (curses) of about 1900 B.C.E. it also appears in the Mari letters from the Mesopotamian city of Babylon of the 18th century B.C.E., in Egyptian documents of the New Kingdom (1567-1085 B.C.E.) and especially in the 14th-century B.C.E. el-Amarna correspondence of the kings of Canaan with Pharaoh Amenhotep III of Egypt.
A coalition of Canaanite kings under Jabin, king of Hazor, engaged in an unsuccessful war against Joshua (Joshua 11:15). Joshua conquered the city (Joshua 11:10-13, “ … and he burnt Hazor with fire”). Later, according to 1 Kings 9:15, Solomon rebuilt Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor. Tiglath-pileser III, the king of Assyria from 745-727 B.C.E., conquered the city in 732 B.C.E. during the general destruction of Israel, according to 2 Kings 15:29. Finally, in 1 Maccabees 11:67, Jonathan Maccabee and his army camped on the plain of Hazor near Cadasa (ancient Kedesh).