Khirbet Qeiyafa

Gwen Ackerman has written an article on Khirbet Qeiyafa, “a walled city over a plain where the Bible claims David killed Goliath.” The article was published on Bloomberg.com. The following is an excerpt from the article:

The remains of a walled city over a plain where the Bible claims David killed Goliath; a pottery shard bearing script that experts claim is the oldest Hebrew text ever found; an ancient water tunnel.

Do these support Scripture’s story of King David and his empire? It depends on who you ask. Recent archeological finds have reopened the debate on David and Solomon, whose reigns almost 3,000 years ago as chronicled in the Bible left so little physical proof that scholars like Neil Asher Silberman, a University of Massachusetts historian, question biblical accuracy.

Hebrew University professor Yosef Garfinkel, in an interview, said his findings amid the ruins of a fortified city in Khirbet Qeiyafa, a five-acre site 20 miles west of Jerusalem, support the biblical portrayal of David as a ruler of a kingdom strong enough to field an army. The findings, the most important of which were a second city gate and the shard, dispute claims by some scholars that David was a chieftain of a largely illiterate tribe.

The remnants might be the most important archaeological find about David since 1993 when a piece of basalt rock bearing an Assyrian king’s inscription about a Davidic dynasty was found in Tel Dan in northern Israel.

NOTE: For other studies on David and Goliath, read my post Studies on David and Goliath.

Claude Mariottini
Emeritus Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

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