Gilgal

Gilgal is the hardest of these places to put on a map, because there is no mound to dig. The site has never been identified. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown wrote in 1871 that "No trace either of the name or site is now to be found," and no excavation since has changed that sentence. Everything below is a proposal, and this page prints the proposals with the names attached and stops there. The text sets four conditions any candidate has to meet. It stands east of Jericho on the plain, between the city and the river (Joshua 4:19; 5:10). It stands on raised ground, since Joshua 5:3 names the spot Gibeath-haaraloth, the hill of the foreskins. It lies within a night's forced march of Gibeon, because Joshua left Gilgal in the dark and struck at dawn (Joshua 10:9). And it is large enough for a nation to camp, with an army convalescing and the ark and the families left behind while the fighting men went out. Three ancient witnesses speak to the location. Josephus, writing about AD 93, puts the camp ten furlongs from Jericho, roughly two kilometres, and glosses the name as liberty, which is not the etymology Joshua 5:9 gives. Eusebius of Caesarea, in the Onomasticon about AD 325 to 330, places Gilgal east of Jericho, and his is the earliest surviving Christian topographical notice of it. The Madaba Map, a sixth-century mosaic floor in Saint George's church at Madaba in Jordan, labels a Galgala and shows a church east of the tell of Jericho, with the twelve stones understood to stand inside it. That last one records where sixth-century Christians believed the stones were, which is a different claim from where they stood. Three sites on the Jericho plain have been proposed. Khirbet en-Nitla was excavated in 1950 by James L. Kelso with Dimitri C. Baramki and published in 1955; Yoel Elitzur argued in 2019 that this is the main biblical Gilgal, sitting where the text puts it between Jericho and the Jordan. Khirbat al-Mafjar, also written Khirbet el-Mefjer, lies three kilometres north of the centre of Jericho and was dug by Baramki from 1935 to 1948, by Awni Dajani from 1957 into the 1960s, and by Hamdan Taha with Donald Whitcomb from 2006. Its standing remains are the Umayyad complex known as Hisham's Palace, an Islamic-period site, so the Gilgal proposal concerns the ground rather than the building. Khirbet al-Athala in the same area has also been put forward. None of the three is established. The name may also survive in a modern place name, and the trail forks. Claude R. Conder of the Survey of Western Palestine gave Jiljulieh as the Arabic name behind Gilgal, and Albert Barnes printed it in his note on Joshua 4:19. A separate northern Jiljilyya near Bethel was proposed by Edward Robinson in 1838 and by Victor Guerin in 1870. W. F. Albright rejected the northern identification and Felix-Marie Abel accepted it. That northern site bears on the Gilgal of Elijah and Elisha rather than on Joshua's camp, and Barnes, weighing the same question on 1 Samuel 7:16, still judged the valley site "far more probably" the one meant. A different kind of proposal came out of the hills. Adam Zertal of the University of Haifa ran the Manasseh Hill Country Survey for three decades and published it with Brill in seven volumes between 2004 and 2022. In the course of it he recorded five large open enclosures whose stone outline is shaped like a foot, at Bedhat esh-Sha'ab near Moshav Argaman, at Masua 4, at Yafit 3, at el-'Unuq, and at Mount Ebal. Their pottery dates to the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC. Zertal read the word gilgal in the Hebrew Bible as naming this kind of structure rather than one town, which would explain how the text can speak of a gilgal beside the oak of Moreh, a gilgal at Jericho, and a gilgal whose king Joshua defeated. He read the foot outline as a claim of ownership on an Egyptian symbolic convention, and derived the Hebrew phrase for pilgrimage, aliyah la-regel, going up to the foot, from assembly at such places. That reading has been answered. Nadav Na'aman rejected it in Tel Aviv in 2024, arguing that the Bible never uses gilgal as a category of settlement and that the scattered references are either textual corruptions or else point to a single unidentified cultic site east of Jericho. Zertal's wider work met the same resistance. At Mount Ebal, where he dug eight seasons from 1982 to 1989 and identified the structure as Joshua's altar, Aharon Kempinski read the same remains as an Iron Age I watchtower in a village, Israel Finkelstein in 1989 called it a ritual site and said the altar identification faces considerable difficulties, and Na'aman read it as a ritual site belonging to Shechem. The plain summary is that the Ebal conclusions did not win the field, and the gilgal proposal rests on the same body of work. What is not disputed is that the enclosures exist, that their pottery is early Israelite, that they are open assembly grounds rather than dwellings, and that they cluster where the text puts Israel's entry. What is disputed is what they were for and whether any of them is Joshua's Gilgal. This page names the positions and awards nothing, because there is no excavated Gilgal to award it to. The map pin on this page comes from OpenBible's geocoding of "Gilgal 1" and is a modern estimate for an unidentified place, not a finding. No engraving on this page shows Gilgal itself, either: the site holds no verified image of the twelve stones, of the circumcision at Gibeath-haaraloth, of the Passover on the plains of Jericho, or of the Commander of the LORD's army, which are the four beats a Gilgal page would most want to show, so each plate on this page is captioned instead for what it actually depicts. One further note for readers who go looking in the Second Temple literature: 1 Enoch says nothing about Gilgal at all, and the site's own copy of it was searched for the name and for Jericho, the Jordan and circumcision without a hit. The one apocryphal mention, 1 Maccabees 9:2 in the King James Apocrypha, sends an army by the road to Galgala and then to Arbela, which is in Galilee, so that Galgala is usually taken to be a northern place. 1 Maccabees is a Second Temple Jewish history of the Hasmonean revolt written in the late second century BC, and this site carries it as a labelled study resource rather than as canon.