Goliath’s True Hometown Found? Lost 3,000-year-old Philistine City Emerges Beneath Gath By Ariel David for Haaretz
GNN Note – More evidence comes to light every day.
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Archaeologists excavating the ancient Philistine city of Gath have uncovered massive 3,000-year-old fortifications of a size unprecedented for their time and place. The discovery could help explain why the Bible names this town as a home to giants, the researchers say.
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The monumental ruins emerged in recent months beneath the remains of a later and already well-explored layer of the Philistine settlement, indicating that researchers have stumbled upon an older city that was partially or completely built over by subsequent generations.
If Goliath did once exist, his hometown would apparently have been this earlier city, not the one under archaeological investigation for decades.
The discovery suggests that Gath was at the peak of its power much earlier than previously thought, putting its heyday around the time when the city features heavily in the biblical narrative as a fierce rival of the early Israelites as well as the hometown of Goliath and other outsized biblical warriors.
“I’ve been digging here for 23 years, and this place still manages to surprise me,” says Aren Maeir, a professor of archaeology at Bar-Ilan University who leads the expedition in Gath. “All along we had this older, giant city that was hiding just a meter under the city we were digging.”
Located in southern Israel, the site is known today as Tell es-Safi. As the name suggests, it is a tell – a mound largely made up of the stratified ruins of multiple settlements left over by millennia of human habitation.
