A New Excavation Reveals the City of Goliath

In the 1990s, a team of archaeologists discovered the ruins of a city from the late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age at the village of Tel Tsafit, some twenty miles southwest of Jerusalem, which they subsequently identified as the biblical city of Gath. More recent exploration has shed new light on the lifetime of its most famous inhabitant, as Sonia Epstein writes:

Archaeologists have discovered remains more ancient and impressive than those previously discovered at the Philistine city of Gath, where, [according to the Bible], the giant Philistine warrior Goliath was born and once lived. Previous excavations at the site . . . uncovered ruins dating to the 9th and 10th centuries BCE, but the new discovery suggests that the city of Gath was at its height in the 11th century BCE, during the time Goliath would have lived.

Goliath was the Philistine whom the young David, the eventual second king of Israel and Judah, famously defeated in single combat, according to 1Samuel 17. Together with Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Ekron, Gath was one of the five Philistine cities until its fall around 830 BCE at the hands of the Aramean king Hazael.

[T[he recent discovery beneath a pre-existing site reveals that [Goliath’s] native city was a place of even greater architectural grandeur than the Gath of a century later. [But, says] Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University’s archaeology department, who directed the discovery at Tel Tsafit, “There are no skeletons of people who are taller than NBA centers.”

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Archaeology, Goliath, Hebrew Bible, King David, Philistines

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society