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Title: Giant gates to Goliath's home discovered: Monumental fortification belonging to the Biblical city of Philistine Gath unearthed
Source:
Daily Mail Online
URL Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet ... Philistine-Gath-unearthed.html
Published: Aug 4, 2015
Author: Richard Gray
Post Date: 2015-08-04 18:30:36 by cranky
Keywords: None
Views: 3458
Comments: 32
It was the Biblical city where the giant Goliath lived and one of the most powerful in the Philistine empire before it was destroyed in the ninth century BC. Archaeologists have now uncovered the remains of an enormous gate and fortified wall which are giving clues to just how formidable the city of Gath may have been. The monumental gate is the largest to ever be found in Israel and much like its most famous inhabitant – Goliath - it would have intimidated any who approached it. Scroll down for video Archaeologists have discovered the remains of what they say is a monumental gate at the entrance to the Biblical city of Gath. They say the gate is the largest to be discovered in Israel. The aerial photograph above shows the remains of the gate and surrounding fortifications that have been unearthed The gate of Gath is referred to in the Hebrew Bible in the story of David's escape from King Saul to Achish, the King of Gath. Alongside the gate, researchers found the remains of a fortified wall with a temple and an iron production facility behind it. Writing on the team's blog, Professor Aren Maeir, an archaeologist from Bar-Ilan University in Israel who has been leading the excavation, said: 'It appears we have located a monumental city gate of the lower city of Gath. 'We still have to do a lot of cleaning, defining, digging and measuring to do, but it appears that there are really good chances we have truly landed on quite an astounding find. 'Many lines of megalithic stone are appearing, with nice corners, features and even mud bricks. 'While we are quite far from fully understanding this architectural complex, it is getting more and more impressive. The more we look at the area – the larger these features appear to be The remains of the city were discovered in the close to the village of Tell es-Safi in the Tel Zafit National Park, in the Judean foothills between Jerusalem and Ashkelon in Israel. The city of Gath was one of five Philistine city-states and according to the Bible was the home of King Ashish and the Philistine warrior Goliath, who was killed by David. It is thought to have been a powerful city during the time of Saul, David and Solomon around 3,000 years ago. However, it was likely destroyed following a siege by Hazael King of Aram Damascus around 830 BC. The city of Gath was supposed to be the home of Goliath, who was killed by David, as illustrated in the drawing by Gustave Doré on the left. Archaeologists have uncovered fortifications either side of of the gate, shown on the right, which they say would have made it a formidable place to attack Professor Maeir and his colleagues say they have found evidence of the widespread destruction that took place in the city after the siege. The site has been excavated for nearly 20 years now under the Ackerman Family Bar-Ilan University Expedition. They have also found evidence of an earthquake which damaged the city in the 8th century BC and may be the disaster mentioned in the Book of Amos in the Hebrew Bible. Large stone blocks used to construct the gateway have been unearthed. The city of Gath was one of the most powerful in the area at the time before it was destroyed in 830BC by the King of Aram Damascus, Hazael Researchers have also found signs that there was large amounts of iron working being done in the area close to the gate. The image above shows a section of the ancient wall that surrounded the city of Gath They have also found the earliest decipherable Philistine inscription, which includes two names similar to the name Goliath. Professor Maeir and his team this year uncovered the gate and around 98 feet (30 metres) of the surrounding fortifications, which have been built with huge blocks of stones. They say there appears to have been extensive iron smelting and working going on in the lower part of the city, close the gate during the 10th and 9th century BC before the city was destroyed. The excavation also uncovered buildings close to the gate and the fortified wall, shown in the image above
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 25.
#3. To: cranky, GarySpFc, liberator, BobCeleste, Vicomte13, TooConservative, *Archeology and Digs* (#0)
Excellent find Cranky. Gary was hinting last month that this would be a good year for Biblical archeology.
When the rivers are traced and the words are read and considered carefully, it can be discerned that the site of the Garden of Eden may well have been the Jerusalem Massif. We cannot possibly know where precisely the Tree of Life once stood, but if we had to hazard a guess,, we can guess that it was on a hill near the site of the ancient city that was in later times called "Place of the Skull".
Abraham was born in Ur. Jerusalem was not founded by Jewish/Hebrew people. My take on the Garden of Eden parable (which is what it is) is that humans became smart enough to understand good and evil when they founded civilization. Just like children are considered blameless if they do something bad if they are below a certain developmental age, so too in my estimation, humans were too simple to understand good and evil and the Godhead until civilization started in the fertile crescent and God could make himself known and understood. This allows for the centuries of life anatomically modern humans have existed (50,000 plus years or more) that was without God's revelation to people.
That's true. Hebrew people did not exist as a separate people. They were made into a people from a polyglot of slaves taken by the naked hand of God out of Egypt. At the core of that group were actual lineal descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but huge numbers of them had no familial relationship with the Jacobites. They were simply other slaves of the Egpytians who all walked out of Egypt today. God then made them into a people. By making a people out of nothing, giving them a land, and then ruling it directly, God was making an example for humanity of how humans should organize thanfe None of that, though, has any real bearing on the location of Eden. The peculiar description of the geography of Eden, and God's particular focus on Jerusalem - putting the people he created THERE, and focusing so many comments on THAT place - seems to indicate God's particular favor for that place. The return to it for key events: the sacrifice of Isaac, the Davidic apparition, Solomon's Temple, Ezekiel's Temple vision, the return from exile to there, Jesus' repeated journeys there, as a boy, as an adult, his death there, his resurrection there, his ascenscion there. And then in Revelation, the new City of God, the New Jerusalem, coming down just there...God likes to beat a relentless tattoo. Given the geographical anomalies, It like a good fit for the original Garden also...which would explain that persistent way in which THAT city has drawn men's eyes through the ages.
There is no rivers there.
There are dead rivers that stream out from the Jordan cleft, which it itself part of the Great Rift that goes from Turkey in the North down through Ethiopia all the way to Olduvai Gorge in Africa. The dead river beds where the Tigris and Euphrates once flowed from the Jordan Cleft are still there. The dead river that stretches across the Arabian desert from the Jerusaelem massif (which is the whole upland formation on which Jerusalem sits, not just the city of Jerusalem). The Jerusalem Massif is still the source of artesian sping. Gihon is the name of the ancient river that wound down from Eden through Ethiopia, and a small river still rises in Jerusalem and then spills down into the Jordan Valley...which itself is the Great Rift. The strange river system described in Genesis - of the heads of four rivers rising in one place and dividing, physicslly exists on the map with the Jordan Cleft as the source of the welling up. Yes, the levels of the land have fallen, such that the Dead Sea Valley is a dead end TODAY, but there was a flood between now and then. The Jerusalem Massif makes sense as Eden for all the reasons said. No, it's not Eden TODAY. But the traces fit it, and it makes sense that it would be Eden.
Stretch
Yes. But not a wild stretch. Eden was a place on earth. It was a place in which waters rose up out of the ground - springs - into a river that then divided into four heads. (It was not a place where four rivers came together, but were four rivers rose up and then divided.) Four specific rivers had to have their heads there: Gihon (Gusher), Hiddikel (Bubbler), Tigris and Euphrates. Now, we could say that those names were pre-flood names of rivers that existed before the Flood, and that after the Flood people just renamed all of the new things by the old names. We could say that, but that really IS a stretch, because floods can change the ground, but when they recede, the hills and valleys are still there. Also, Genesis tells us of Tigris that it ran against Asshur (Assyria), which of course it still does. It says that Hiddikel twisted through the land of Havilah, where there was real gold. (The gold there was good - meaning that it was not bad gold, which is to say iron pyrite, fool's gold, the hard kind that isn't malleable.) It says that Gihon twisted through Ethiopia. So, to get away from those geographical reference points: Tigris, Assyria, Euphrates, Havilah (the stretch of Arabia between Transjordan and the Persian Gulf) and Ethiopia, you have to take those names and say they were names, but that those names were not associated with anything today, just names that, after the applied, were reapplied to new geographical features. That is possible - seems like a stretch. It always seemed to me that to test this would require seriously looking for the rivers mentioned in Genesis. Tigris and Euphrates we know. Their headwaters, today, are in the Iranian and Turkish highlands. But there are no other rivers up there that fit the bill. The other two rivers are a mystery. Gihon and Hiddikel. There are no rivers by that name. There's no river in Havilah at all: it's dry desert. There is a river that twists around Ethiopia, but it originates in the area around the salt sea of Afar (which is really a low salt desert, not a "sea" or lake anymore. It once was. That's where they found Lucy's bones along with shellfish, and it's part of my version of "Sea Ape" theory expounded elsewhere. But that Ethiopian River and the Sea of Afar are a long way from Tigris and Euphrates headwaters. They have nothing in common. But actually, that's not true. They DO have something in common. Both fall near the Great Rift, the large, deep fault in the Earth's crust that runs from Olduvai Gorge up through the Sea of Afar, across the shallow end of the Red Sea (forming the arm of water that reaches up to Eliat), then northwards through the Dead Sea, up to the Sea of Galilee, and North. The Jordan River runs at the bottom of the Great Rift. Now, there are two things that prevent the Jordan from running all the way down to Ethiopia. One is the Red Sea, but with lower sea levels, the rift is above the water there. and the other is the higher land at the end of the Dead Sea that makes it a dead end. The Dead Sea plain is the lowest in the world below sea level. And that plain has sunk over the ages. It sits on an aquifer, and that aquifer drains out of the Jerusalem Massif (which is not simply Jerusalem, but the highlands on which Jerusalem sits). In fact, to this day those springs that come out of the Jerusalem Massif and go into the Jordan Valley, and accumulate in the Dead Sea. And the artesian river that springs up in Jerusalem and runs down its watercourse to Jordan has always been called "Gihon", back to Biblical times, and still is. Now, we can assume that, because it's a spring that gushes up, and "Gihon" means "gusher", that the Jews just gave that name in remembrance of Gihon of Genesis. We could say that the Gihon could not be the river of Genesis because it's far from Ethiopia. Except that it is not. The Gihon flows into the Jordan, which would flow down to the Sea of Afar and Ethiopia, down the Great Rift, to the river there that meets the description of Genesis, but for the higher sea level of the ocean, and the low sea level of the receded ground on the Dead Sea Plain. We should remember that the water for the Flood game from below as well as above. The Earth opened up and water gushed out as well as the gates of the sky opening and water dropping down. The land that is the Dead Sea Valley could have fallen as it emptied out its water to the world during the Flood. We know that the plain is full of salt, and unstable, from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and their bitumen pits. So, the only thing standing between the Gihon that still gushes out of the Jerusalem Massif into the Jordan, and runs down the Great Rift on the path to that river in Ethiopia, is the high land at the end of the Dead Sea, but that land is high only because the land level of the plain has fallen so low, and that could be explainable by geological recession due to the emptying of an acquire. Lending further credence to this idea of the Gihon/Great Rift/Sea of Afar/Ethiopian border river as THE Gihon is the fact that, if we go north, we discover that the Tigris and Euphrates DID formerly flow down from the Great Rift. The now dry river valleys (which act as mountain passes) of both watercourses do join those two rivers to the Jordan/Great Rift system. And now, suddenly, if we rehydrate the ground as before, and lower the sea level, as before, and fill the Jordan Valley/Great Rift up, as before, with water that gushes out of the Jerusalem Massif, and used to gush more, we have three of the four rivers actually linked, by real geography, to a common river that rose out of the ground right in that area. In other words, two rivers certainly DID rise and divide from the Jordan Valley: Tigris and Euphrates, and if we un-recede the unstable Dead Sea Valley, the Gihon gushes out of the ground and flows out through Jerusalem to the Jordan, down to the Dead Sea, across the formerly elevated plain, and down the Great Rift Valley all the way to Ethiopia. That's three of the 4 rivers of Genesis all "rising up" from the artesian springs in the area of the Jerusalem Massif (and Dead Sea Valley - partly explaining the land recession as the water sprung out of it), and then dividing into two of the named rivers with a defined ancient watercourse that DID do exactly that, and a Great Rift path which, with land re-elevation, would carry Gihon down to Ethiopia too. But then there's that fourth river: Hiddikel - "Bubbler". It winds through the land of Havilah, which is the Arab desert from Jordan through Iraq or Saudi, to the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean. There is no river, you justly noted. That's true. There is no river. But there was. The name "Bubbler", and that it was "twisting" tells us that this was a babbling brook, a shallow stream, not a wide, deep-cut navigable river. Satellite photos have revealed many things. They've revealed lost cities in the Amazon and Yucutan. They've revealed underwater formations and secret bases. And they have revealed a wide river that used to meander down from the Jordan Cleft across the Transjordan, and wind through the land of Havilah, to the Persian Gulf. And now we have FOUR Rivers, whose heads all rose up from the artesian springs of the Jerusalem Massif, flowed into the Great Rift and then divided into four rivers: Gihon, which ran down the Rift to Ethiopia, Hiddikel, which flowed East, and Tigris and Euphrates, which divided out of the Great Rift Jordan Valley, and flowed through the ancient beds that are still there. All of this is in the right place geographically, and it fits the Genesis account perfectly, and puts Eden on the Jerusalem Massif. What "stretch"? The only thing that does not work, presently, is the water flowing down Gihon towards Ethiopia, because of the low elevation of the Plain. Which has a plausible explanation that fits with the facts of artesian wells and the Flood itself. This geography is real. Anybody can look it up. And truth is, with the proviso for the elevation issue in the Dead Sea Plain, it fits the Genesis story like a glove, lending credence to it. Accepting what I have said is true for a moment, what objections remain to the thought that Genesis through the Flood are actual recorded history? Mainly two: (1) Radioactive Dating of materials, and (2) Starlight distances. Be patient and consider that the Soviets (who were anti-theists) calculated in the 1980s the rate of decay of the speed of light constant, based upon three centuries of speed of light measurements and calculations. When fitted to a curve, the data has the speed of light decaying by about 1% in the past 400 years, and following a parabolic function back in time until the speed of light was billions of times faster tens of thousands of years ago. If light has slowed, it accounts for the red-shift of the galaxies. The universe is not expanding, the light in transit is slowing down. It also explains enormous ages in measured radioactive decay. Radioactivity is an energic function, related to "c". As c accelerates along a parabolic curve, the rate of radioactivity, likewise, increases as a function. Which means that if you apply a straight-line measurement to something that accelerates as you go back in time, you will grossly exaggerate the ages of things. And, the further back one goes, the bigger the time spreads appear to be. That's why. And that's how Genesis could be literally true. And it's how, and why, I say that the Jerusalem Massif is really the only geographical place that fulfills the geographical description of the four rivers, if two of those rivers are Tigris and Euphrates. And it fits God's pattern: where he first placed man, in His Garden, is there His City comes to earth at the end. There's an elegant symmetry to it all.
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#6. To: redleghunter (#3)
#13. To: Vicomte13, redleghunter (#6)
(Edited)
When the rivers are traced and the words are read and considered carefully, it can be discerned that the site of the Garden of Eden may well have been the Jerusalem Massif. We cannot possibly know where precisely the Tree of Life once stood, but if we had to hazard a guess,, we can guess that it was on a hill near the site of the ancient city that was in later times called "Place of the Skull".
#14. To: Pericles (#13)
Abraham was born in Ur. Jerusalem was not founded by Jewish/Hebrew people.
#15. To: Vicomte13 (#14)
#19. To: Pericles (#15)
There is no rivers there.
#21. To: Vicomte13 (#19)
#25. To: Pericles (#21)
Stretch
Replies to Comment # 25.
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