Biblical Tels - Megiddo, Hazor, Beer Sheba
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How it came to be
Israel has more than 200 tels, mounds formed as towns were rebuilt on the same spot. In the north, Hazor, about 80 ha, was the largest fortified city in the region from around 1750 BCE to the 9th century BCE and appears in the Amarna letters of around 1350 BCE. It burned around 1200 BCE, and in 732 BCE the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III deported its people and burned the city.
At Megiddo, about 50 km southwest of Hazor, Thutmose III of Egypt fought a Canaanite coalition led by the kings of Megiddo and Kadesh in the 15th century BCE. In Christian apocalyptic writing, Mount Megiddo is identified as Armageddon, the site of the final battle named in Revelation 16:16. Beer Sheba, in the south near the Negev, keeps an orderly Iron Age town plan and a system for collecting rainwater.
All three are known for Iron Age underground water systems, and after their decline they were left largely untouched. At Hazor John Garstang made soundings in 1926, and Yigael Yadin led major excavations from 1955 to 1958. Yohanan Aharoni dug Beer Sheba from 1969 to 1976 and found the first horned altar unearthed in Israel. The three tels were inscribed in 2005.
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