The place the survivors are chased to after Israel attacks the hill country without the ark — 'they struck them and beat them down, as far as Hormah' (Numbers 14:45). ⚠ The name is a pun and an epitaph: Chormah is built on cherem, the root for something devoted to destruction, so the place where they are destroyed is called Destruction. The naming gets its own story later, and a happier one — at Numbers 21:3 Israel finally wins there and devotes the towns, and the etymology is supplied at that point rather than this one; Judges 1:17 says the town had been called Zephath before. ⚠ Where it was is genuinely disputed. Yohanan Aharoni identified it with Tel Masos in the northern Negev, about 15 km south-east of Beersheba; Benjamin Mazar preferred Tel Malhata (Tell el-Milh), roughly 12 km south-west of Arad; Tel Ira has also been proposed, and Israel Finkelstein rejects the Tel Masos identification altogether, reading the site as Amalekite rather than Israelite. The argument turns on occupation dates rather than on the text. The atlas marks it approximate for that reason: the candidates sit within about ten kilometres of one another in the Beersheba valley, which is as much as can be honestly claimed.