Note #9026 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:
 

06619 Nov. 17, 2005

Archaeologists make 'Goliath' discovery

Inscription may be first evidence for famous Bible story of giant's demise

by Michele Green Ecumenical News International

JERUSALEM - Archaeologists are excited about recent discoveries in Israel that date to the Biblical period and provide insights into life in the Holy Land about 3,000 years ago.

Among the finds is an inscription with a name remarkably like "Goliath," the Biblical giant slain by David. It may be the first extra-Biblical evidence that the David and Goliath story has a basis in history.

Archaeology professor Aren Meir, who found the inscription on a shard of pottery in the ruins of the ancient Philistine city of Gath, said the chance that the name is a reference to the Goliath of the Biblical account is "small if not non-existent."

However, Meir, from Israel's Bar-Ilan University, said it does show that Goliath was a common name among the Philistines at the time - around 950 B.C., about 100 years after the estimated date of David-Goliath encounter.

The ruins of Gath, between the modern-day Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon and Jerusalem, is where Goliath lived, according to the Bible, before he was killed by David, a goatherd armed with a slingshot who would become Israel's king.

"This means that at the time there were people there named Goliath," Meir said. "Thus, this appears to provide evidence that the Biblical story of Goliath is, in fact, based on a clear cultural realia (objects of a local culture) from, more or less, the time which is depicted in the Biblical text."

The discovery will be presented later this month to participants in an archaeology conference in the United States. At the same conference, U.S. archaeologists will present what they believe to be an ancient Israelite alphabet etched in stone, discovered at the excavation of a town called Tel Zayit, near Jerusalem.

Ron E. Tappy, an archaeologist from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, who directed the dig, said the inscription dates to about the 10th century B.C. It may indicate that Tel Zayit was a flourishing border town in an expanding kingdom ruled by David and his son, Solomon.

If true, it would undermine arguments of many archaeologists that David and Solomon were tribal chiefs rather than the empire builders of the Biblical stories.

Tappy reportedly told The New York Times that a town of such size and culture suggests a fairly advanced system that would support the Biblical accounts of a golden age in Israelite history.