Kibroth-hattaavah is an Israelite encampment in the wilderness, remembered as the place where a vast supply of quail was followed by a severe plague and deaths among the people. The narrative makes the site a grim landmark in the route from Sinai: the Israelites gathered the meat in great quantity, but the episode ended in divine anger and burial, and the people then journeyed onward to Hazeroth.

The Quail and the Plague

A wind from the LORD brought quail from the sea and dropped them around the camp, extending about a day’s journey in each direction and lying about two cubits above the ground. The people gathered through the day and night and into the next day; even the person who gathered least collected ten heaps, and the quail were spread around the camp.

While the meat was still between their teeth, before they had chewed it, the LORD’s anger was kindled and a very great plague struck the people. The place was named Kibroth-hattaavah because the people who had lusted after the meat were buried there. The abundance that had seemed to answer their appetite thus became inseparable from the deaths it preceded.

A Landmark on the Wilderness Route

From Kibroth-hattaavah the Israelites journeyed to Hazeroth and stayed there. The itinerary also places Kibroth-hattaavah after the encampment in the wilderness of Sinai and before Hazeroth, making it one point in the ordered record of their wilderness stages.

The episode’s location gives the journey a moral as well as geographical shape: the encampment is identified not simply by where the people stopped, but by what happened there and whom they buried. Its name preserves the contrast between the quail gathered in heaps and the graves left behind.