Where did Samson live and die?

Question

Accepted Answer

Samson's country is the valley of Sorek, where the hills of Judah come down to the coastal plain about 23 km west of Jerusalem, on the border between the tribe of Dan and the Philistines. He was born at Zorah, Tel Tzora on the north side of the valley, and Eshtaol lay less than 3 km away; Beth-shemesh is 3 km across the valley, and Timnah, where he took his Philistine wife, 7 km down the valley at Tel Batash. Lehi, where he fought with the jawbone, is not identified; the map places it nearby. He died at Gaza, 58 km to the south-west, the Philistine city at the edge of the desert, and was buried at home between Zorah and Eshtaol. Judges begins with “a certain man of Zorah, of the family of the Danites, whose name was Manoah”, and says that the Spirit “began to move him at times in the camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol”. “And Samson went down to Timnath, and saw a woman in Timnath of the daughters of the Philistines”; later “he loved a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah”. At Gaza he “took the doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts, and went away with them, bar and all, and put them upon his shoulders, and carried them up to the top of an hill that is before Hebron”, 60 km and some 900 m up, if the hill is at Hebron. Blinded, he was brought “down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house”, and when the house of Dagon fell on the Philistine lords, his brothers “buried him between Zorah and Eshtaol in the buryingplace of Manoah his father”. The places are real and have been dug. Tel Batash, Timnah, excavated by George Kelm and Amihai Mazar in 1977–1989, was a Philistine town of the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC in the valley below Zorah; Beth-shemesh across the valley was then, its excavators Bunimovitz and Lederman argue, a Canaanite border village; there in 2012 they found a small seal of the period showing a man beside a lion, which they link to a Samson-like tale without claiming it shows Samson. Zorah's name survived in the Arab village of Sar'a until 1948, and Eusebius pointed the village out as Samson's home. Of Gaza's temple nothing is known: the ancient city lies under the modern one. The date of Samson is uncertain, in the eleventh century BC on most reckonings, in the last generations before Saul; the map places him about 1100 BC.