Taybeh () is a Christian Palestinian village in the West Bank, 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) northeast of Jerusalem and 12 kilometers (7.4 miles) northeast of Ramallah in the Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, 850 meters (2788 feet) above sea level. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Taybeh had a population of 1,452 in 2007. Taybeh is one of the about a dozen majority-Christian villages in the West Bank. Etymology "Taybeh" means "The goodly". In 1882, SWP suggested that Taybeh might have been ancient Ophrah. According to local tradition, Saladin met a delegation of its inhabitants during his wars against Crusaders. Impressed by the hospitality of the locals, he renamed the village Taybeh, or "goodly" in Arabic. Another version of the story is that he was charmed by their goodness and the beauty of their faces, ordering the village to be renamed Tayyibat al-Isem ("beautiful of name") instead of what sounded like Afra ("full of dust"). According to Israeli archeologist Hanan Eshel, When the Arabic language was adopted in the region of Palestine, some place-names called Ofrah were renamed Taybeh in order to avoid mentioning Ifrit, a demon in Islamic mythology. Biblical significance Ancient period It has been suggested that Taybeh might have been ancient Ophrah. The town is mentioned in Josephus' The Jewish War during the time of the First Jewish-Roman War under the Greek appellation Ephraim (). According to Conder and Kitchener, Taybeh was an important place during both Jewish and Crusader times. They noted a rock-cut tomb in the village with multiple kokhim, which they thought was originally Jewish but was later reused by Christians as evidenced by the double Latin cross relief cut above the entrance. Byzantine period In the 5th century, a church, known today as St George's Church, was built in the east of the town. Crusader period In the 12th century, another church was built by the Crusaders attached to the first one. The Crusaders fortified Taybeh by means of a castle named in English the Castle of St Elias. In February 1182, Joscelin III gave the castle to king Baldwin IV of Jerusalem along with some other properties in return for the lordship of Mi'ilya. In 1185, the king Baldwin V of Jerusalem granted the castle to his grandfather William V, Marquess of Montferrat. However, in 1187 Taybeh fell to Saladin in the wake of the Battle of Hattin. Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani