Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fortified town about 1000 BC
A fortified town with urban planning existed in the Judahite hill country around 1000 BC, in the valley 1 Samuel names.
ContestéSite fouilléc. 1020–980 BC
A small walled town with casemate walls and two gates, occupied briefly around 1000 BC and then abandoned — so its layer is unusually clean. No pig bones, no cult statues, and an inked ostracon in an early alphabetic script were found in it. It looks across the valley where 1 Samuel sets David and Goliath.
And the Philistines stood on a mountain on the one side, and Israel stood on a mountain on the other side: and there was a valley between them.
- Découvert
- Overlooking the Elah valley, Israel, 2007 — Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor's excavation
- Conservé à
- In place; finds in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem
- Comment il nous est parvenu
- Fouillé, ou encore debout là où il fut bâti.
Ce qu'elle montre
The dating is secure by radiocarbon; almost everything else is argued — whether the town is Judahite, Philistine or Canaanite, whether it is the biblical Shaaraim, and what the ostracon says. It bears on the debate about a tenth-century state, and does not settle it.
Ce qu'en font les historiens
One of the most debated excavations of the last twenty years, argued in the mainstream journals from both sides.
Dans l'Écriture
Se rattache à
Sources
- Garfinkel & Ganor, Khirbet Qeiyafa Vol. 1 (2009); Finkelstein & Fantalkin, Tel Aviv 39 (2012)
Ces textes sont pour l'instant en anglais. Les traductions suivront.