The Afterlife of Gath of the Philistines
Samuel - Rachelle Gilmour
Daniel Pioske [+]
University of St Thomas
Daniel Pioske is an Associate Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. He is the author of three books, David’s Jerusalem: Between Memory and History (Routledge, 2015), Memory in a Time of Prose (Oxford, 2018), and The Bible Among Ruins (Cambridge, 2023).
Description
The city of Gath is referred to more often than any other Philistine location in the Hebrew Bible. But what is peculiar about these references is that the Philistine center was destroyed relatively early in the history of the Iron Age (ca. 830 BCE). Biblical stories about the location and those individuals connected to it, including both David and Goliath, therefore took shape and were developed further after the city had fallen into ruin. This study proposes that the ruins of Gath itself contributed to the formation of these stories, calling to mind to later audiences the monumental city that Gath had once been.