Mount Gilboa

Start with what is not in dispute. The ridge is Gilboa, and the identification does not rest on excavation. It rests on the Arabic name Jebel Fuqu'a, on the village of Jelbon on the southern slope, which preserves the Hebrew name, and on the fact that the geography of 1 Samuel 28:4 works only here. Albert Barnes recorded both name survivals in his note on that verse. The high point is about five hundred metres, the ridge runs about fifteen to eighteen kilometres, and the site's own stored coordinates for the place, 32.5098 north and 35.4084 east, sit on it. The spring of Harod is generally identified with Ain Jalud, a large pool at the northwestern foot of the ridge. Edward Robinson made that identification in Biblical Researches in Palestine (1841), and C. R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener mapped the whole area for the Palestine Exploration Fund in The Survey of Western Palestine between 1881 and 1883. Barnes gives the standard identification and also records Conder's alternative proposal, Ain el-Jem'ain, the spring of the two troops. The name Harod means trembling, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown connect it to the panic that sent twenty-two thousand of Gideon's men home. That is a reading of the name and not a finding from the ground, and it is given here as theirs. Judges 7:3 sends the fearful home from Mount Gilead, and Gilead is on the far side of the Jordan from Gideon. Three readings are on the table. The first holds the text sound and takes the phrase as a form of proclamation customary in Manasseh, whose territory lay on both sides of the river; Barnes reports it. The second would read Gilboa for Gilead; Adam Clarke reports that Augustin Calmet proposed it and Charles Houbigant adopted it, and Clarke states plainly that no manuscript and no ancient version supports the change. The third takes Gilead to mean the eastern Manassites serving in Gideon's army, the men most exposed to Midianite reprisal, which Clarke prefers and credits to William Hales. This page names the three and chooses none. Three places in this story stand around one hill. The hill of Moreh is Jebel ed-Duhy, also called Nebi Dahi and sometimes Little Hermon, the isolated rise in the middle of the valley two or three miles north of Gilboa; Barnes gives that identification. Shunem, where the Philistines camped, is the village of Sulam on its southwestern slope, identified from the preserved name and from the town's appearance in Late Bronze Age Egyptian records including the Amarna correspondence. Endor is placed at the Arab village of Indur, with nearby Khirbet Safsafa proposed as the ancient settlement, on the northern side of the same hill. That is the geography Jamieson, Fausset and Brown are pointing at when they note that Saul had to pass over the shoulder of the ridge on which the Philistines were encamped. The walk was roughly ten to thirteen kilometres each way over broken ground, at night, in disguise, and back before morning. No excavation at Endor or at Shunem has produced anything bearing on that night, and this page says so rather than implying otherwise. Beth-shan, called Beth-shean elsewhere in Scripture and Scythopolis under Greek and Roman rule, is the mound of Tell el-Husn, about ten to twelve kilometres east of the ridge where the Harod valley meets the Jordan valley. The University of Pennsylvania Museum excavated it across four seasons from 1921 to 1933 under three directors, Clarence Fisher, Alan Rowe and Gerald FitzGerald. They exposed a long sequence of Late Bronze and Iron Age levels including a series of temples, and recovered Egyptian royal monuments: two stelae of Seti I, a stele of Ramesses II and a statue of Ramesses III. The latest Egyptian royal object from the mound is a bronze statue base naming Ramesses VI, in the mid twelfth century BC, which is usually taken as the end of Egyptian control. On any standard chronology Egypt was gone from Beth-shan before Saul died, and the Philistines held the town on their own account. Amihai Mazar directed a new excavation for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1989 to 1996, and Yigael Yadin and Shulamit Geva had already re-examined the Pennsylvania stratigraphy in Qedem 23 in 1986. The temples are where the dispute sits. First Samuel 31:10 says the Philistines put Saul's armor in the temple of the Ashtoreths and hung his body on the wall of Beth-shan. First Chronicles 10:10 says they put the armor in the temple of their gods and hung his head in the temple of Dagon. Rowe identified two of the buildings he excavated as those two temples, naming the southern one for Ashtoreth and the northern one for Dagon, and that identification passed into a generation of handbooks. Mazar's redating of the relevant levels means it is no longer treated as established. What is not disputed is that Beth-shan had temples, that it had a city wall, and that Scripture names two temples in one episode. What is disputed is whether Rowe's two buildings are the two the text names. Albert Barnes proposed a different location again, reading the temple of Ashtaroth as the temple at Ashkelon that Herodotus calls the most ancient of hers, and that is his reading rather than a finding. Barnes is also the one who explains how the wall of 1 Samuel and the public square of 2 Samuel 21:12 are the same spot: the wide open place inside an eastern city gate is bounded by the city wall, and that is where a body was fastened for a town to see. Clay coffins with modelled human faces were found in the cemetery north of the mound. Trude Dothan discussed them in The Philistines and Their Material Culture (1982) in connection with Sea Peoples serving as mercenaries in Egyptian garrisons. Other scholars, Mazar among them, hold that the coffin type is Egyptian and is not by itself evidence of Philistine presence. Both readings stand here and neither is stamped as settled. The biblical account does not depend on either, since it says the Philistines controlled Beth-shan on the day after the battle and not that they had lived there for generations. Jabesh-gilead, east of the Jordan in the Wadi el-Yabis whose Arabic name preserves the ancient one, has two candidate sites: Tell el-Maqlub, favoured by Nelson Glueck from his surveys of eastern Palestine, and Tell Abu Kharaz, excavated from 1989 by Peter Fischer for the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Fischer sets out the case rather than claiming it is proven, and the question is open. Either candidate lies roughly fifteen to twenty-five kilometres from Beth-shan with a river crossing between, which is what the men of Jabesh covered in a night, twice, carrying bodies. Zela, where the bones finally went, is listed among the towns of Benjamin at Joshua 18:28 and has never been located. Scripture does not date the battle. Traditional chronologies put Saul's death around 1010 BC and most handbooks use that figure. James Ussher's Annals of the World gives 1056 BC. Scholars working on a lower chronology place the period later. This page leads with the traditional date, names the range, and settles nothing. The length of Saul's reign is uncertain in the sources themselves: Acts 13:21 gives forty years, Josephus's figures differ between passages, and the Hebrew of 1 Samuel 13:1 is defective at exactly the point where the number would stand, which is why English versions handle that verse so differently from one another. The last piece of evidence answers the line everyone knows. David's "may you have no dew or rain" is repeated as though the mountain has been dry ever since. It has not been. The ridge receives ordinary hill country rainfall in the range of four hundred to five hundred millimetres a year, which is why terraces and orchards work on its slopes. John Gill had already answered the legend in the eighteenth century by citing Burchard of Mount Sion, the Dominican who travelled in the Holy Land in the 1270s and 1280s, for being soaked through by a violent shower on the mountain and for a heavy dew falling on him when he slept there in 1273. Gill spells the name Borchard. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown wrote the opposite impression, that the curse seems still to lie on them because the mountains of Gilboa are naked and sterile, and that is what a nineteenth-century traveller saw on a limestone ridge stripped of its trees. John Wesley calls the line no proper imprecation but a passionate representation of horror, and Barnes sets it beside Job 3:3 to 3:10 and Jeremiah 20:14 to 20:18, where the same poetic form curses a day rather than a place. The verse is a funeral song. The mountain gets rain.