Wars in the Valley of the Elah

Mornings I take the dog for a walk in the Valley of the Elah (just south of Beit Shemesh), where, according to the Bible, the young David slew the Philistine giant Goliath, saving the children of Israel, later called the Jews.

The valley is a mile or two from my home. Midway in the two-kilometer walk I rest on a rock for a few minutes, the land’s history spread out at my feet and in the hilltops around.

To my left, westward, just above some bushes, I can see the crest of Tel Azekah and just behind me, southward, looms Tel Socho (or Shochoh). According to the Bible (Joshua 10:10-11), Joshua, the general who around 1200 BC led the children of Israel across the Jordan River into the Promised Land, Canaan, or the Land of Israel,[1] slew the native Amorite forces “[as far as] Azekah.” The Good Book also tells us that Joshua had some help: “The Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died; [indeed] they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.”

But of course, the two tels (tel: an archaeological mound consisting of layers of human occupation or a hill on which such layers amassed) are better remembered for the duel fought by the Hebrew shepherd and the Philistine giant. The Book of Samuel (I Samuel 17) tells us that “between Shochoh and Azekah,” the Israelite and Philistine armies “gathered together” and “pitched [their tents],” and David faced off with Goliath of Gat, “whose height was six cubits and a span.” So “David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it and smote the Philistine in his forehead … and he fell upon his face to the earth … [and] David ran, and stood upon the Philistine, and took his [Goliath’s] sword, … and cut off his head therewith. And when the Philistines saw their champion was dead, they fled.”

It’s a good story, but was it true? Who knows. But in recent decades scholars, challenging the historicity of the Old Testament, have questioned whether David even existed or, alternatively, if he had, perhaps he was a mere tribal chieftain who ruled a minute patch of territory rather than an epic ruler of a (relatively) powerful kingdom.

Which brings us to the brush-dotted hill, Khirbet Qeiyafa (Khirbet Caiapha), on the other, northern side of the Valley of the Elah, perhaps a kilometer from my dog-walking perch. From it you can see the rudiments of an ancient wall and bald, rock-strewn patches behind.

The notion that “King David” was a wholly mythical invention of chroniclers half a millennium or more after the events described was put to rest, at least for most archaeologists and historians, by the discovery in 1993 in Tel Dan in northern Israel of a stele from the end of the 9^th century or the eighth century BC, probably commissioned by King Hazael of Damascus. The partly-preserved inscription tells of the king’s victory over Jehoram, king of Israel, and Ahaziah, king of Judea. Written in Old Aramaic – a Semitic language, a “cousin” of Hebrew – the text, in Phoenician script, refers to the two as scions of “the House of David.”

But the question of David’s regional stature and the girth of his kingdom remains. The Bible described a powerful king ruling a “United Kingdom” covering present-day Israel\Palestine, and parts of modern-day Jordan, southern Syria and Lebanon. “Minimalist” historians, such as Haifa University’s Israel Finkelstein, downgraded David and his “kingdom” to a small tribal domain encompassing Hebron and Jerusalem and the hills around. “Maximalists,” such as Hebrew University archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel, argued, along biblical lines, that David was a potent monarch ruling a large kingdom inherited and further expanded by his son Solomon (c. 970-931 BC).

Then came the extended archaeological dig at Khirbet Qeiyafa during 2007-2013. The discovery of remains of monumental buildings and foundations of a circular wall with two gates, with some stones weighing eight tons, led many historians to the conclusion that here were the ruins of the Biblical town of Sha’arayim (in Hebrew meaning two gates, an unusual construction in Biblical times). But the wall, the large, apparently administrative, structures from the early 10^th century BC, and an ostracon from that century with proto-Phoenician\Hebrew writing found at the site indicated that this was a Judean outpost of a large well-ordered kingdom. Hence, a powerful king ruling a spacious “United Kingdom.”

(Some historians have speculated that Joseph ben Caiaphas, the Judean high priest who, according to the New Testament, presided over the Sanhedrin’s trial of Jesus, originated in Qeiyafa.)

From my perch in the valley, just to the right and slightly above Khirbet Qeiyafa, loom the stone-faced multi-story apartment blocks of modern (upper) Beit Shemesh (meaning in Hebrew, house of the sun). In recent years the city has significantly expanded southward, toward the valley. In Biblical times, Beit Shemesh was a Canaanite town whose pagan inhabitants may have been sun-worshippers. After conquest by the children of Israel, it became a fortified town on the Judean-Philistine border; for a time, according to the Bible, the Israelites’ sacred Tabernacle, the portable sanctuary, was located there.

Today, the city of Beit Shemesh, with close to 200,000 population, is a major haredi – ultra-orthodox Jewish – center. It is ceaselessly expanding because haredi families have six-to-eight children a piece and, as they mature and marry, all require housing. (Secular Jewish Israeli families average 2-3 children each.) The haredim today constitute some 13-14% of Israel’s population (and 15-17% of Israel’s Jews). They do not serve in the army and few of the males work or pay taxes. Their political parties have routinely served in Israel’s coalition governments and are prominent and indispensable members of the current coalition, and so have a stranglehold on the purse-strings. The haredim live on state subsidies, meaning off the taxes paid by the country’s (still) secular majority, and most Israelis regard the haredim as a parasitic community. Against the backdrop of the ongoing war, which began in October 2023, the haredim argue that it is their prayers and religious-scholarly pursuits, not the IDF, that protect the state.

But paradoxically, God has not been protective of the haredim in the current conflict. Rather the opposite. Beit Shemesh and Bnei Brak, the country’s main haredi city, have both been disproportionately hit by Iranian ballistic missiles. Indeed, nine haredim died in the 1 March ballistic missile strike on Beit Shemesh. This was the war’s most lethal Iranian attack. As well, many dozens of haredim have been wounded in both Beit Shemesh and Bnei Brak over the past month’s attacks, partly because their towns lack sufficient shelters and partly because the country’s haredim traditionally ignore government safety directives (as they also did during the Covid epidemic). (Altogether, 16 Israeli civilians have so far died in Iranian and Hezbollah missile attacks in the current war.)

Looking from my perch north-eastward, just across the valley, stands Kibbutz Netiv Halamed-heh, just below the looming haredi structures, which appear about to eat up the kibbutz’s small red-roofed homes (a metaphor for Israel’s demographic-political glissement). The name of the kibbutz, meaning “the route of the 35,” echoes the name of the pre-1948 Arab village, Beit Natif, on whose lands the kibbutz was established in 1949 by Haganah-IDF veterans. After the1948 War many new settlements were established on abandoned Arab lands and they were often given Hebrew names that phonetically or alphabetically echoed the name of the pre-existing Arab villages (for instance Beit Meir-Beit Mahsir). Occasionally, the Arab village names were themselves echoes of the ancient Jewish villages that had been there before (for example the nearby West Bank Arab village of Battir sits on the site of the Roman-era Jewish town of Beitar.)

In Jewish tradition, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a numerical value. The first letter of the alphabet, aleph, has the numerical value of 1. The Hebrew letter lamed has the value of 30 and the letter heh, 5. Hence lamed-heh means 35. For Jews, this number inevitably conjures up the number 36, lamed-vav, lamed being 30 and vav, 6, echoing the religious Jewish concept of the Lamed-Vav or the thirty-six hidden righteous people who sustain humanity or the world (vide Andre Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, a best-selling novel in France and the US in 1959-1960).

But more concretely, the 35 in Netiv Halamed-heh refers to the 35 Haganah troopers who in January 1948 tried to reinforce the besieged Zionist settlements of the Etzion Bloc located up in the Judean Hills mid-way between Bethlehem and Hebron. The 35, in a night-time trek through Arab-populated countryside, were ambushed by hundreds of Palestinian militiamen and slaughtered to the last man, a major disaster and trauma in the early days of the first-Arab Israeli war. Most of the 35, who had volunteered for the dangerous mission, were young Hebrew University students and included budding scientists and artists, the cream of the Yishuv, the collective name of Palestine’s Jewish population.

So the new State of Israel honored them by establishing a kibbutz along the route of their trek toward the Etzion Bloc. (The Bloc’s four kibbutzim were eventually conquered by the Jordanian Army (the “Arab Legion”) and Palestinian militiamen in mid-May 1948 – but new Israeli settlements were soon established there after Israel conquered the West Bank in June 1967).

Netiv Halamed-heh, like its 275-odd sister kibbutzim, with its flourishing agriculture and rich cultural life (the Vertigo Dance Company), represents the polar opposite of the country’s ghetto-like, insular, unproductive haredi communities.

Lastly, looking eastward from my perch on the rock I see, about five hundred yards away, the cluster of giant and small dishes of the Elah Valley Satellite Station or “teleport. One medium-sized dish is partly blackened and damaged. It was hit on 9 March by a long-range Hezbollah rocket that Israel’s sophisticated anti-missile defenses had failed to intercept. The Israeli media initially failed to report this Hezbollah success. But apart from Beit Shemesh, the Elah Valley region has rarely been targeted or hit by Iran and its proxies and we have generally enjoyed peaceful nights’ sleep.

In the days before the war, as I drove along Route 38 toward Beit Shemesh, I would see busloads of Japanese (or Korean or Chinese?) tourists disembarking and walking toward the dry riverbed that bisected the Elah Valley. Occasionally, a tourist would bend over and gather pebbles. He may even have pocketed a few of David’s “five smooth stones out of the brook” [I Samuel, 17:40]” or even the one that had felled the Philistine giant.

[1] The naming of the land: We don’t know what the Amorites called the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. But a thousand years after David and Goliath, the Romans, who gained control over what they called “Judaea” during the first century BC and the first century AD, renamed it “Palaestina,” a derivative of Philistia or Pleshet, the Hebrew name of the narrow coastal region, between Jaffa and Gaza, earlier inhabited by the Philistines, a “sea people” who likely arrived from the Aegean Islands near the end of the second millennium BC and for a few centuries battled the children of Israel. When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, the expanding Christian world began to call the land Palestine, a name later adopted, in a variant, “Filastin,” by the Muslim Arabs, who conquered the country in the 7^th century AD. The name “Palestine” or “Filastin” does not appear in the New Testament or in the Qur’an.