What is…
Gaza in the Bible

also known as: Azzah (its Hebrew name (Deuteronomy 2:23; 1 Kings 4:24; Jeremiah 25:20), meaning: strong)

This is the name of a city on the Mediterranean shore, remarkable for its early importance as the chief center of great commercial traffic with Egypt. Gaza was the southernmost of the five Philistine capitals, a fortified border town on the Egypt road (the “Way of Horus,” aka the Via Maris, “road of the sea”) a major ancient trade route linking Egypt to Syria,Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. It had a fortified gate with wooden doors and a watchtower (Judges 16:2, 3).

History

Gaza is one of the world’s oldest cities (Genesis 10:19; Joshua 15:47). Its earliest inhabitants were the Avims, who were conquered and displaced by the Caphtorims (Deuteronomy 2:23; Joshua 13:2-3), a Philistine tribe.

Philistia consisted of a pentapolis of cities: Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon (Askalon), Ekron, and Gath, all combined to make Philistia.

The city is noted on monuments as early as 1600 BC. Its port was later called el-Mineh.

In the division of the land, Gaza fell to the lot of Tribe of Judah (Joshua 15:47; Judges 1:18).

It was the southernmost of the 5 great Philistine cities which each gave a golden emerod as a trespass-offering unto the Lord (1 Samuel 6:17).

Embarrassingly, the city gates were carried away by Samson (Judges 16:1-3). Here he was afterwards made a prisoner, and “did grind in the prison house.”

Here he also pulled down the temple of Dagon, killing “all the lords of the Philistines,” himself also perishing in the collapse (Judges 16:21-30).

Prophecies and judgments of God

The prophets announced judgments of God against Gaza (Jeremiah 25:20; Zeph. 2:4).

Thus says the Yahweh,
“For three transgressions of Gaza and for four
I will not turn back its punishment
Because they took away into exile the whole community of exiles [refers to slave raids]
To deliver it up to Edom.
So I will send fire upon the wall of Gaza,
And it will consume her citadels. —Amos 1:6-7 LSB

Historically this prophecy fits the Assyrian campaigns (Sargon II took Gaza in 720 BC and deported its king Hanun).

In Jeremiah 25:17–20, Gaza is listed among the nations that must drink the cup of the Lord’s wrath, with Ashkelon, Ekron, and “the remnant of Ashdod.”

Jeremiah 47:1–7 foretells a coming flood-like invasion of Gaza by an enemy. The sword of Yahweh will not be at rest until its work is done against Ashkelon and the seacoast. This was fulfilled when Pharaoh Necho II struck Gaza.

Baldness has come upon Gaza;
Ashkelon has been ruined.
O remnant of their valley,
How long will you gash yourself? —Jeremiah 47:5 LSB

Here, the “baldness” of Gaza is not a disease or a comment on its appearance. This refers to a mourning rite: people shaved their heads (or tore out their hair) to show extreme grief after death or disaster.

The city is personified as a mourner whose head has been shaved. The NIV translation makes this explicit: “Gaza will shave her head in mourning.”

Shaving the head and gashing the body were common in the ancient Near East at funerals and after a city’s fall.

Zephaniah 2:4–7 (late 7th century BC)

For Gaza will be forsaken
And Ashkelon a desolation;
Ashdod will be driven out at noon,
And Ekron will be uprooted. —Zephaniah 2:4 LSB

Then a reversal: the coast becomes pasture and sheepfolds; “the seacoast shall belong to the remnant of the house of Judah”; they will lie down in the houses of Ashkelon, “for the Lord their God will be mindful of them and restore their fortunes.”

Zechariah 9:5–7 (post-exile)

This may refer to what happened as a result of Alexander the Great’s campaign. Alexander took Gaza in 332 BC after a 5-month siege; the “king shall perish from Gaza” fits that event especially well.

Ashkelon will fear; “Gaza too, and shall writhe in anguish”; Ekron’s hope is confounded.

“The king shall perish from Gaza; Ashkelon shall be uninhabited.”

A mixed people will dwell in Ashdod; “I will cut off the pride of Philistia.” Blood and abominations will be removed from their mouth; a remnant will become “like a clan in Judah,” and Ekron “like the Jebusites.”

The next verses (Zec. 9:9, 10) are the famous “your king comes… humble and mounted on a donkey,” so this prophecy sits next to messianic hope.

Philip the evangelist

Gaza is referred to in Acts 8:26. Philip is here told to take the road from Jerusalem to Gaza (about 6 miles southwest of Jerusalem), “which is desert”, i.e., the “desert road,” probably by Hebron, through the desert hills of Southern Judea.

Location

Archaeology

Findings indicate that Gaza became a Philistine stronghold in the 12th–11th centuries BC, exactly when the Samson events occurred.

A late Iron IIC destruction layer has been noted in probes at Gaza, comparable to the 604 BC Babylonian destruction at Ashkelon—consistent with the prophecies against the Philistine cities.

Ancient Gaza itself has been only lightly excavated. The biblical city is generally identified with the mound Tell Harube (Tell el-Kharrube) under and beside modern Gaza City, so large-scale digging has never been possible. Most of what archaeology can say about biblical Gaza therefore comes from limited efforts on that tell plus much richer work at nearby sites in the Gaza Strip that belonged to the same landscape: Tell el-Ajjul, Tell es-Sakan, al-Moghraqa, Deir el-Balah, and the port at Blakhiyah (Anthedon).

The city mound: Tell Harube

In 1922 W.J. Phythian-Adams cut trenches on the northwestern slope of the ancient mound. He found a long sequence from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age, including pottery of Philistine type. Later small probes have added more Iron I–II material. That is enough to show the tell was occupied in the periods the Bible associates with the Philistines, but not enough to map streets, gates, a prison, or a temple. The site has been too poorly sampled. Therefore, no building that can be called Samson’s gate or Dagon’s house has yet been located.

For the most part, the modern city of Gaza is sitting on the ancient ruins, leaving the inaccessible.

Tell el-Ajjul: the richest nearby Bronze Age city

About 4 miles (6 km) southwest of Gaza, Tell el-Ajjul is the major excavated site of the region. Flinders Petrie dug it in 1930–1934 (he thought it was ancient Gaza). Peter Fischer and Moain Sadeq returned in 1999–2000.

The site shows what a wealthy Canaanite city on Gaza’s doorstep looked like just before and during the era of Egyptian rule that precedes the Philistine settlement. Finds include:

• Fortified Middle and Late Bronze Age city with palaces
• 3 gold hoards and elaborate jewelry (now in the British Museum and Rockefeller Museum)
• The largest concentration of scarabs in the Levant (over 1,300), many locally made, some Egyptian
• Heavy Cypriot imports (including rare White Slip I), plus pottery from Syria, Egypt, and the Mycenaean world
• Pumice from the Thera eruption, used for dating
• Some early Iron Age, Philistine-style pottery

Earlier and Egyptian-period sites

Tell es-Sakan (discovered 1998; excavated by Pierre de Miroschedji and Moain Sadeq) is an Early Bronze fortified town (circa 3300–2250 BC). The earliest phase is strongly Egyptian: mud-brick walls, Egyptian-style pottery, grain silos, and jar fragments with serekhs that may name Narmer, an ancient Egyptian king of the Early Dynastic Period—end of the 4th millennium BC. He had a prominent presence in Canaan, compared to his predecessors and successors.

A later phase is more Canaanite. It is the best evidence that the Gaza coast was already an Egyptian–Canaanite gateway a millennium before the biblical narrative records.

Al-Moghraqa, near Wadi Gaza, produced Late Bronze prestige items, including terracotta cones stamped with the cartouches of Thutmose III and Hatshepsut—direct proof of 18th-Dynasty Egyptian activity in the Gaza hinterland.

Deir el-Balah, a short distance south, yielded a famous cemetery of Egyptian-style anthropoid clay coffins, faience, alabaster, and gold, dating to the late 14th–13th centuries BC. It belongs to the period of Egyptian garrisons in Canaan, the world into which the Philistines arrived.

Egyptian texts of the New Kingdom already name Gaza as an administrative center on the “Ways of Horus.” That matches the archaeology: Egyptian control, then a break, then a new coastal culture.

The port of Gaza: Blakhiyah / Anthedon

This is ancient Gaza’s harbor through the later biblical and post-biblical centuries (Assyrian, Persian, Hellenistic). Finds illustrate the “strong” fortified port the prophets and later writers knew.

• A late Iron Age II mud-brick rampart (often linked to Neo-Assyrian fortification of the Egypt road)
• Persian-period houses
• Hellenistic painted houses and an emporium
• Roman walls, villas, mosaics
• A Byzantine cemetery

Because Gaza’s own Iron Age levels are thin, scholars reconstruct its Philistine character from the other 4 cities of the pentapolis, which have been extensively dug: