According to the book of Kings, “Hazael king of Syria went up, and fought against Gath, and took it: and Hazael set his face to go up to Jerusalem.” In response, the Judean king Jehoash forestalled an attack on the capital by paying Hazael an impressive ransom. Israeli archaeologists have recently applied a new technique, involving the analysis of magnetic fields, to charred bricks in the ruins of Gath—located southeast of Ashdod—and found support for the biblical account. Judy Siegel-Itzkovich writes:

The prevalent hypothesis, based on the Bible, historical sources, and carbon-14 dating, attributes the destruction of the structure to the devastation of Gath by Hazael, King of Aram Damascus, around 830 BCE. But a previous paper . . . proposed that the building had not burned down but rather collapsed over decades and that the fired bricks found in the structure had been fired in a kiln prior to construction.

“Our findings signify that the bricks burned and cooled down in situ, right where they were found, namely in a conflagration in the structure itself, which collapsed within a few hours,” [the director of the study, Yoav] Vaknin declared.

In other words, the brick structure appears to have been burned down, most likely by an invading army.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].