The Bible says that David pushed the Philistines out of the hill country surrounding Gibeon all the way west to Gezer (McCarter 1984, 152, 157). David was able to reintegrate the ark of the covenant into the religious life of Israel and to unify Israel under God and his reign. Did David, though, chase the Philistines to the gates of Gezer, or did he perhaps take Gezer? Can the archaeological record give us more information about the Philistine presence there?

The fortified city of Gezer was built on a hill that overlooks the coastal plain and is within eyesight of the Philistine city of Ekron. It is in the Shephelah, the foothills, overlooking the highways going to and from Egypt and Syria. At Gezer, one is high enough to see the sun set into the Mediterranean.

Gezer was one of the cities allotted the tribe of Ephraim (Josh. 16:10), but even though Joshua may have killed Horam, the king of Gezer (Josh. 10:33; 12:12), Gezer itself was not captured (Josh. 16:10; Judg. 1:29). Both Joshua 16 and Judges 1 refer to the Canaanites that dwelled there during the period of Joshua and the subsequent judges. The material excavated from Gezer indicates that there were Canaanite inhabitants there during the time of the judges, but the abundance and type of Philistine material in strata XIII-XI (ca. 1175 to 1050 B.C.) suggests to some that the Philistines were the overlords (Dever et al. 1986, 87f.; A. Mazar 1990, 312).

Gezer may have been unoccupied for a time at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the twelfth centuries B.C. Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah in his famous stele (final quarter of the thirteenth century B.C.) claims to have conquered the people of Israel, as well as Ashkelon, Gezer, and other cities. An ivory pendant bearing the cartouche of Merneptah was found by an early excavator at Gezer. After what may have been a hiatus in occupation, the Philistines arrived circa 1175 B.C. No Mycenaean IIIC:1b pottery had been found at Gezer, similar to the situation at Timnah and Qasile. However, in the Gezer of the twelfth century B.C., we find an abundance of the classic Philistine pottery. On what is called the acropolis area of the tell a public building has been uncovered, which the excavators refer to as the "Cyclopean Complex." It was perhaps a public granary with threshing floors. Sometime around 1125 B.C., this structure was destroyed and then rebuilt. Perhaps this destruction was due to local disturbances, or perhaps some new Sea Peoples came to Gezer. After one more disturbance at the end of the twelfth century, the complex was converted into elaborate private housing. The transition from an industrial area into an elegant, patrician area may imply that the Philistines were mercenaries for the Egyptians at Gezer or simply were overlords of the local Canaanite population (Dever et al. 1986, 87f.). During the eleventh century these houses were destroyed, and by the middle of the eleventh century B.C., the Philistine culture was no longer distinctive. The bichrome pottery was no longer present at Gezer and had disappeared from other Philistine sites as well. This brings us to the time of Saul and David.

Let us return to the question asked earlier. Did David capture Gezer, or did he only smite the Philistines to Gezer? No destruction from this time can be found, and according to the Bible, Gezer presented a problem for David later on in his reign (see 1 Chron. 20:4). Furthermore, in 1 Kings 9:16-17, Gezer was given to Solomon by the pharaoh of Egypt after the pharaoh had attacked it, killed the Canaanites, and burned the city. This gracious pharaoh gave Solomon an Egyptian princess to be his wife, and he presented Gezer to Solomon as his daughter's dowry. The biblical record tells us that David had captured parts of the Philistine territory -- such as Gath (1 Chron. 18:1) -- all the way to the Mediterranean. This would have included Tell Qasile, according to B. Mazar (A. Mazar 1973, 46), but evidently David left Gezer alone. The Philistine town of Ashdod was also destroyed at the beginning of the tenth century B.C. (M. Dothan 1968, 254; 1969, 244), perhaps by King David or by Pharaoh Siamun, according to T. Dothan (1982a, 42). David was definitely powerful enough to have taken Gezer, in view of his other conquests, but perhaps he left it as a buffer between Israel and Philistia; or perhaps Philistia still had some sort of vassal relationship with Egypt, and David was being diplomatic in not wanting to anger the pharaoh (Lance 1967, 40-41; Dever, Lance, and Wright 1970, 4-5; Bright 1981, 199). After all, Egypt had controlled this area for centuries. At this time it simply is not known why David left part of Philistia alone.

As mentioned above, Chronicles records that a later pharaoh (perhaps Pharaoh Siamun of the Twenty-first Dynasty) attacked and burned Gezer and then turned it over to Solomon. According to the archaeological record, Gezer was burned sometime around the middle of the tenth century B.C. The Egyptian pharaoh was perhaps following an age-old custom of checking out a strong neighbor after the death of its king. (We will see this happening again after the death of Solomon, when Israel was split.) The pharaoh came north after Solomon became king, perhaps demonstrating by his display of power over Gezer: "This is my territory. I can still control it." Tel Mor, the port for Ashdod, was also destroyed, as was Beth-shemesh. It might be, however, attacking Gezer as well as other cities and then marrying off a daughter to Solomon indicates the weakness of the pharaoh and shows that Solomon was viewed by his neighbors as a power to be reckoned with (Dever, Lance, and Wright 1970, 5; Lance 1967, 41-42; Bright 1981, 212).

We will come back to Gezer when we discuss Solomon's reign and his links to Philistia. Let us move on now, however, to Ekron to illustrate that Philistia was definitely shrinking in power and size during the years of David's reign, regardless of whether it was a vassal to Egypt or to Israel. Philistia had been subdued (2 Sam. 8:11-12), and the archaeology of Ekron clearly demonstrates this.

Ekron was on the eastern end of Philistia, and it had been one of the Philistine staging areas to invade Israel and Judah, as we have discussed in previous sections. Full-scale excavation on the fifty-acre tell of Ekron began during the summer of 1984, and for the first few seasons the talk of the excavation centered on the problem of the "missing" tenth-eighth centuries B.C. (see pp. 41-43). Successive seasons revealed the story. Early in the tenth century B.C., circa 975, only the upper section of the tell was occupied. This was the acropolis area, approximately ten acres in size. The lower forty acres were basically abandoned for 270 years! Small wonder that the Bible rarely mentions Ekron during these three centuries. It was not one of the cities fortified by Solomon or Rehoboam (see 2 Chron. 11:5-11, for example, in which Gath but not Ekron is mentioned).

The evidence shows that during the Iron IIA period, the tenth to eighth centuries B.C. (beginning in David's time), Ekron shrunk to one-fifth of its previous size. What is to account for this? The directors of the excavation believe that this decrease in size must somehow be related to the ascendancy of Kings David and Solomon and the growing might of a united Israel (Gitin 1990, 34; Gitin and T. Dothan 1987, 214). "Some time afterward, David attacked the Philistines and subdued them" is an appropriate summary from 2 Samuel 8:1. Gezer, for whatever reason, was left alone by King David; Ekron became a small shell of its former self. What of Ekron's sister city, Timnah, during the same time frame? The excavators there believe that not only was Timnah taken from the Philistines but it was changed into an Israelite town (Kelm and A. Mazar 1989, 41f.). They base this opinion on the typical Israelite pottery (bowls and kraters with a thick red slip and hand burnish) found there, which dates from the tenth century B.C. This is true not only for Timnah but also for Beth-shemesh to the east. Beth-shemesh was mentioned in the 1 Samuel 6 story of the return of the ark by the terrified Philistines. Even though there was an Israelite population in Beth-shemesh at the time of the story (see 1 Sam. 6:10-21), the Israelites may have faced economic and political domination by the Philistines, a condition typical throughout the entire Sorek Valley during the period of the judges. Philistine domination ended for Beth-shemesh in the tenth century B.C., when it was captured by King David (T. Dothan 1982a, 51).

Whereas Ekron remained a Philistine town, its neighbor Timnah became an Israelite town. But like Ekron, Timnah was only partially built up in the tenth century B.C. (A. Mazar 1990, 387-90, lists and discusses Israelite towns). One of the interesting finds from this period in Timnah was a pottery sherd incised with a Hebrew name -- [Be]n Hanan or "son of Hanan." Hebrew inscriptions from the times of David and Solomon are rare, the Gezer Calendar⁵ being the major exception. The Timnah excavators point out that Hanan is included in Solomon's list of his governors and their districts in 1 Kings 4:9: "Ben-deker, in Makaz, Shaalbim, Beth-shemesh, and Elon-beth-hanan. . . ." Note the mention of the town of Beth-shemesh, and note as well that Elon has an additional form behind it, beth-hanan, meaning "house of Hanan." The town of Elon is mentioned in Joshua 19:43 as belonging to the tribe of Dan, along with Timnah and Ekron. The excavators at Timnah suggest, therefore, that in the tenth century B.C. the family of Hanan resided in the area of Timnah, Ekron, and Beth-shemesh (Kelm and A. Mazar 1989, 42).

One final comment is in order concerning Ekron in this time period. As stated earlier, in 1984 a backhoe was in operation off the mound below the northeast acropolis. It was important to get at the soil underneath the erosion runoff from the tell and the wadi, and soil samples for flotation were planned. All of a sudden the backhoe struck huge, finely cut stones (referred to as ashlars) that formed the stone wall described in chapter 2. This wall turned out to be the facing for a twenty-two-foot-wide mudbrick tower attached to a new mudbrick wall, which may date to the tenth century B.C. city (Gitin 1990, 34). The city may have been reduced to ten acres in size, but it had a massive tower in its northeast sector. However, it was impossible in 1984 and is still impossible to excavate the tower because the water table is higher now than it was during the Iron Age. Water pumps were brought in in an attempt to drain the water so that the wall could be excavated to its base. However, the water came in as fast as it was pumped out, and some of the ashlar facing stones began to slide into what was fast becoming a frog pond -- creating a dangerous situation, for the workers, not the frogs!

This tenth century B.C. ashlar-facing mudbrick wall is similar to what Oren describes at his excavation at Tel Sera` (Ziklag?), where he excavated mudbrick buildings faced with ashlar blocks from the same tenth-century period. At Tel Sera` the ashlars were used on only the three-course-high foundation levels, but at Ekron the workers have not yet been able to reach the foundation levels to compare them thoroughly with Tel Sera`. Another site that had a similar type of construction was Ashdod, where the ashlars were integrated into the tenth-century B.C. gate built after the city's destruction by David or Siamun. This rebuilding at Ashdod may have been due to the split of Israel after Solomon. At all three sites -- Tels Sera`, Ekron, and Ashdod -- there was a continuity of the Philistine culture in the transition from Iron I to Iron II in spite of the defeats at Ekron and Ashdod, which were perhaps the work of King David. At Ekron especially, the decline of Philistine might and strength was clearly visible, but like the Greek phoenix, the Philistines would rise again. Philistine warriors even began to show up as David's professional soldiers, as we shall see in the next section.