Gath: a major Philistine city on the border between the coastal plain and the hill country of Judah, called by the everyday Hebrew word for a winepress
Gath was one of the five great Philistine cities, and the one that sat closest to Israel. It stood where the flat coastal plain runs up against the foothills of Judah, on a mound that excavators now call Tell es-Safi. Egyptian and Canaanite records name a town on that spot centuries before the Philistines arrived, so the Philistines took over a name that was already old. Being the nearest Philistine city made Gath the one Israel dealt with most, in trade, in flight, and in war.
The name itself is not exotic. It is the ordinary Hebrew word for a winepress (גַּת), the shallow rock basin where grapes were trodden at harvest. To a Hebrew ear the town was simply "Winepress," much as an English village might be called Millbrook. That is also why the name is not unique: the Bible knows a Gath-hepher up north (גַּת הַחֵפֶר), a Gath-rimmon (גַּת־רִמּוֹן), and a Gittaim (גִּתָּיִם) whose name reads like "Two Presses." When Amos wants to be clear which town he means, he calls it "Gath of the Philistines."
The name turns up in four kinds of setting:
- the Philistine city as a piece of the political map, listed alongside its sister cities, captured, fortified, and broken open in turn
- the town the giants came from, Goliath above all, along with the oversized warriors his relatives fought
- the court of king Achish, a foreign refuge that David reached twice while Saul hunted him, and that runaway servants later fled to from Jerusalem
- the enemy town that must not be allowed to hear bad news, which is how the name enters both David's lament for Saul and a prophet's roll call of doomed towns
Gath did not stay in one set of hands. David took it from the Philistines, Chronicles counts it among the towns Rehoboam fortified for Judah, an Aramean king captured it on his way toward Jerusalem, and a later king of Judah broke down its wall. Two lines in the Chronicles family lists speak of the men of Gath fighting Israelite families much further north, near the pass of Aijalon, and some scholars think a smaller town of the same name is meant in those verses.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether every occurrence of the name refers to the major Philistine city, or whether some verses name a different, smaller Gath in the border country between Israel and Judah.
- majorityThe name normally refers to the great Philistine city, securely identified with the mound of Tell es-Safi in the Shephelah, which the El-Amarna correspondence already calls Gimtu or Gintu.; A. F. Rainey, "The Identification of Philistine Gath," Eretz-Israel 12 (1975): 63*-76*; A. M. Maeir, ed., Tell es-Safi/Gath I: Report on the 1996-2005 Seasons, AAT 69 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012); N. Na'aman, "The Shephelah according to the Amarna Letters," in Canaan in the Second Millennium BCE, Collected Essays 2 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005)
- minoritySeveral references, including the town in Micah's list of doomed places and the one in Rehoboam's list of fortified towns, belong to a different Gath located in the border zone of the eastern Aijalon valley.; C. McKinny, "Pressing On: Identifying the 'Other' Gath," in I. Shai et al., eds., Tell It in Gath, AAT 90 (Munster: Zaphon, 2018)