According to AYBD, it is! [:)]
Not quite. AYBD advocates that it is "most likely" the same place but mentions that there alternative possible locations. NIBD for instance states that the location is uncertain. Bottom-line: to list Arimathea as Ramah in the Places dataset is an interpretive commitment that in my view is not necessary.
You're right. I admit being guilty of reading only the heading of the article. Lesson learned!
And yes, tagging them as the same thing doesn't look like an interpretive decision that had to be made.
The LBD explanation of the equating of the two cities:
If LBD says so, it must be true... [;)]
Because we want to support features like search and context-menu lookup, we will consider two names to reference to the same entity if we think there's substantial scholarly consensus. If there's signficant disagreement but some sources say two names refer to the same entity, we (sparingly) use a different representation for "possibly same as" (those wind up in the See Also section of Factbook, for example).
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