Biblical Archaeology Review - January-February 2018

Digs 2018

30 JAnuARY/FEBRuARY 2018

minutes west of Jerusalem in the Shephelah (the

fertile foothills in south-central Israel between the

Judean Mountains and the Coastal Plain), serves as

an ancient border between Judah and Philistia. The

Shephelah itself has witnessed a number of exciting

new excavations spring up over the past decade fol-

lowing the stunning discoveries at Khirbet Qeiyafa,

a fortified settlement that excavation directors Yosef

Garfinkel (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and

Saar Ganor (Israel Antiquities Authority) claim to be

from the time of King David.

In the Elah Valley, Aren Maeir (Bar-Ilan Univer-

sity) directs the excavation at Tell es-Safi, which

most scholars identify as the ancient Philistine city

of Gath, one of the five cities of the Philistine Pen-

tapolis and the home of the giant Goliath mentioned

in 1 Samuel 17. The Late Bronze Age residents of

this site, the Canaanites, were displaced by the Phi-

listines, who immigrated to the region toward the

end of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1200 B.C.E.). Maeir’s

latest research from Safi has suggested that the Phi-

listines weren’t simply Aegean peoples arriving and

conquering the Late Bronze Age residents of the

eastern Mediterranean coast, but were the result of

an “entangled” culture, slowly mingling “Western”

peoples (e.g., Mycenaean, Minoan, Cypriote, Ana-

tolian, etc.) with Canaanite coastal peoples over a

lengthy period of time.

Across the verdant Elah Valley from Tell es-Safi is

the Judahite border city of Tel Azekah, where Oded

Lipschits and Yuval Gadot (Tel Aviv University) and

Manfred Oeming (University of Heidelberg) have

completed five seasons of excavation. Azekah served

as a strategic stronghold on the border with the Iron

Age Philistines. This massive excavation, now the

largest in Israel in terms of annual participants, is

exploring what life was like for residents living on

the border between ancient Judah and Philistia.

South of these two digs, the Tel Burna excavation,

directed by Itzhaq Shai (Ariel University), explores

the site that is the leading candidate for Biblical

DIGGING NABOTH’S VINEYARD. Across the Jezreel Valley

on the foothills of the Gilboa Mountains, the Jezreel Expe-

dition is excavating a large rock-cut winery that might

have belonged to the period of Naboth (1 Kings 21). Here,

area supervisor Inbal Samet takes notes while team mem-

bers excavate a wall.

COURTESY OF THE JEZREEL EXPEDITION