A MOUND — and specifically the layered heap a destroyed city becomes, each rebuilding raising the ground a little higher over the last ruin. ⭐ Tel olam, ‘a mound forever’, is a sentence rather than a description, and it stands in exactly two verses of the Hebrew Bible: Deuteronomy 13:17, where it is decreed for an apostate Israelite town, and Joshua 8:28, where it is what Joshua makes of Ai. The law and its one execution use the same two words. ⭐ The word never went archaic: it is the Tel of Tel Megiddo and Tel Hazor, and of Tel Aviv, and it is still what archaeologists call the mounds they dig. ⚠ A tel is therefore not rubble but stratigraphy — the reason a ruined city is readable at all is that it was left as a heap and not rebuilt, which is precisely the sentence this verse passes. → first discussed at Deut 13:17