Gath of the Philistines: A New View of Ancient Israel’s Archenemy

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A quarter-century of excavations at Tell es-Safi, site of the Philistine city of Gath, has allowed archaeologists to refine longstanding assumptions about ancient Israel’s most feared rivals and how these people of foreign origin integrated into the social and ethnic fabric of the southern Levant. Venture into this thriving metropolis to glimpse the rich and diverse culture of one of the region’s most powerful Iron Age kingdoms.

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Footnotes

1. See Daniel M. Master, “Piece by Piece: Exploring the Origins of the Philistines,” BAR, Spring 2022.

Endnotes

1. While I continue to direct the limited excavations at Gath, the project is now focused on publishing the finds and results. See Aren Maeir, ed., Tell es-Safi/Gath I: Report on the 1996–2005 Seasons. Ägypten und Altes Testament 69 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012). Aren Maeir and Joe Uziel, eds., Tell es-Safi/Gath II: Excavations and Studies. Ägypten und Altes Testament 105 (Münster: Zaphon, 2020); and Itzhaq Shai, Haskel Greenfield, and Aren Maier, eds., Tell es-Safi/Gath III: The Early Bronze Age, Part 1. Ägypten und Altes Testament (Münster: Zaphon, 2023).

2. Aren Maeir and Louise Hitchcock, “The Appearance, Formation and Transformation of Philistine Culture: New Perspectives and New Finds,” in P. Fischer and T. Bürge, eds., The Sea Peoples Up-to-Date: New Research on the Migration of Peoples in the 12th Century BCE (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2018), pp. 149–162.

3. See Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “When Gath of the Philistines Became Gath of Judah: Dramatic Glimpses of Biblical Archaeology,” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 10.3–4 (2022), pp. 317–342.