Antiquity

It has been suggested that Yaroun is the biblical town of Iron/Jiron, mentioned in Joshua 19:38 as a village belonging to the Tribe of Naphtali.^[1][2]

Ottoman period

In 1596, it was named as a village, يارون النصارى (Yarun an-Nasara meaning “Yarun of the Christians”) in the Ottoman nahiya (subdistrict) of Tibnin under the liwa' (district) of Safad, with a population of 37 Muslim households and 20 Muslim bachelors, and 39 Christian households and 11 Christian bachelors. The villagers paid taxes on a number of crops, such as wheat, barley, olive trees, vineyards, fruit trees, goats and beehives, in addition to "occasional revenues"; a total of 7,247 akçe.^[3][4]

In 1674, western travelers saw remains of a monastery and church near by, with fragments from many columns.^[5]

In 1781 Nasif al-Nassar was killed here by Jazzar Pasha when their two armies met.^[6]

In 1838, Edward Robinson noted it as "a large village".^[5] Ernest Renan visited Yaroun during his mission to Lebanon and described what he found in his book Mission de Phénicie (1865-1874). He found many antiquities at Yaroun.^[7]

On 31 December 1863, Louis Félicien de Saulcy, the French orientalist and archaeologist left Jish and arrived in Yaroun, and despite the heavy rain on that day, he examined the ruins of a temple, with a huge sarcophagi and sepulchral excavations cut into the rock, and a square well few meters deep, deducing that Yaroun was the Biblical town of Iaraoun, one of the cities of the Naphtali tribe mentioned in the Book of Joshua (xiv. 38).^[8]

According to Victor Guérin, who visited in 1870, the town had 300 Greek Orthodox Christians and 200 Shia Muslims. He described the local church, devoted to St. George ("Mar Jiris") as simple and modest, and pointed out a Greek inscription and a decoration of a date tree in the local mosque, which, according to the inscription, were once part of a nearby temple.^[9]

In 1881, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) described it: “A stone village, containing about 200 Metawileh and 200 Christians ; a Christian chapel in the village. The village is situated on the edge of a plain, with vineyards and arable land; to the west rises a basalt-top called el Burj, full of cisterns, and supposed to be the site of an ancient castle ; there are large stones strewn about ; there are three large birkets and many cisterns to supply water; one of the birkets is ruined."^[10]

SWP also found here the remains of an ancient Church, with Greek inscriptions.^[11]

Lebanon

By the 1945 statistics the population was counted with Saliha and Maroun al-Ras, to a total of 1070 Muslims^[12] with 11,735 dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey.^[13] Of this, 7,401 dunams were allocated to cereals, 422 dunams were irrigated or used for orchards,^[14] while 58 dunams were built-up (urban) area.^[15]

In July 2006, Yaroun, like many other villages that string Lebanon's southern border, such as Ain Ebel, Debel, Qaouzah, and Rmaich, were caught by the 2006 Lebanon War between Hezbollah and the Israeli Defense Forces.^[16] On the 23 July, 5 civilians were killed in an Israeli strike in Yaroun; victims were aged between 6 months and 75 years old.^[17]