The Goliath Inscription
The oldest Philistine inscription ever discovered was recently excavated in 2005 in Goliath's home town of Gath (Tel es-Safi) by an expedition headed by Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University.
The inscription was scratched with a needle-like instrument on a small pot-sherd and dates from the tenth to mid-ninth century B.C.E. that mentions two names very similar to the name “Goliath.” Two non-Semitic names appear on the sherd (Alwt and Wlt),
Of the two names on the sherd, the first consists of four Semitic letters: TWLA [Hebrew font, alef-lamed-vav-tav], which Maeir says may be the equivalent of the name Goliath. Although it was written with Semitic letters, the name is apparently Philistine.
The shard dates back to around 950 B.C., within 70 years of when biblical chronology asserts David squared off against Goliath, making it the oldest Philistine inscription ever found, the archaeologists said.
The remarkable part of the find is that Tell es-Safi (Gath), located on the Israeli coast between Ashkelon and Jerusalem, is the same town that the Bible claims is the birthplace of Goliath, the biblical figure that David meets and kills in battle. The inscription may give evidence that the legendary biblical battle between the Philistines and the Israelites actually did occur. Written in “Proto-Canaanite,” archaeologists placed the date around the 10th or 9th centuries BCE, which falls in the same time period as the United Kingdom of ancient Israel.
According to Professor Aren Maeir, Chairman of Bar-Ilan University's Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, “...this (inscription) appears to provide evidence that the biblical story of Goliath is, in fact, based on a clear cultural realia from, more or less, the time which is depicted in the biblical text, and recent attempts to claim that Goliath can only be understood in the context of later phases of the Iron Age are unwarranted.”
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