On our way to visit the remains of Lake Hula (you can read about a previous visit here), we passed through Yesud HaMa'ala (יְסוּד הַמַּעֲלָה), a moshava of the Old Yishuv established in 1883. Near to the moshava is Tel Talil (Khirbet Teleil), identified with the Jewish village of Thella (תֶ'לָה) by Conder and Kitchener in the Galilee volume (1881) of the Survey of Western Palestine, where they state that "Et Teleil, 'the Little Mound,' appears to be the Thella of Josephus [...]―a village near the Jordan, forming the eastern limit of Upper Galilee." Josephus, in The Jewish War, III.3, describes the extent of the upper Galilee, thus: "...from which beginning also is taken the breadth of the Upper Galilee, as far as the village Baca, which divides the land of the Tyrians from it; its length is also from Meloth to Thella, a village near to the Jordan."
More recently, the village was thought to have been about 700 metres south of the tel on the eastern edges of the moshava, based on the discovery of a synagogue there dated to between the 4th and 6th centuries CE. Excavation by Abraham Biran and Dan Urman in 1974, and again by Abraham Biran and Yair Shoham in 1982-1983, unearthed basalt column bases and drums. The building became a sugar factory in the Mamluk period (12th and 13th centuries). The site today is not too impressive, though the masonry is of high quality (pictured above, with Amber providing scale).
The identification, made by Biran, relied on the building's plan, the architectural elements which are certainly from a Byzantine-Roman synagogue, and on nineteenth century historical reports mentioning an Aramaic dedicatory inscription―since lost―found at the site when the moshava was being built. However since no pottery or coins were found in the excavations, and subsequent surveys in the moshava have unearthed no finds from the time, it has been suggested by others that the synagogue elements were moved here from another location for reuse in the Mamluk period. Further evidence of this is that the basalt columns stand on limestone bases dressed identically to those found at the Crusader castle of Vadum Jacob (Metzad 'Ateret). These stones also appear to have been brought from elsewhere for reuse and, indeed there is no nearby natural source of either limestone or basalt. An alternative site for Thalla has been proposed at Khirbet Makbarat Banut Yakub, somewhat to the south, about 2.5 km north of the Banut Yakub ('daughters of Jacob') bridge, on the west bank of the Jordan.
Returning to the tel, the Arab village of Tulayl (تليل) existed there by the end of the sixteenth century, evidenced by an Ottoman register of 215 Muslims there. Conder and Kitchener recorded there a village with "modern cattle-sheds and traces of ruins of basaltic stone." It is possible―though to my knowledge the tel has not yet been excavated―that the basalt synagogue elements originated on the tel. By the end of the British Mandate, Tulayl had expanded westwards to approach the village of al-Husayniyya, which itself was expanding eastwards. The two villages―which were Muslim―shared a school established by the local Society of Village Improvement. Tulayl was apparently abandoned by its inhabitants in the course of Operation Yiftach, probably in late April 1948 (Morris, B. (2004), The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited). Today only one stone house remains, in ruins, on the overgrown tel.