Tel Beit Shemesh
During the first Jewish return, at the beginning of the Second Temple period, there was no lasting revival of the city, as opposed to many other places in the vicinity such as Beit Guvrin,[dubious – discuss] Maresha, and others.
Boaz Gross, the head of the excavation expedition at the Tel on behalf of the Israel Institute of Archaeology, believed that the structure is not Hasmonean but probably from the Herodian period.
[13] During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Egyptian Army invaded the area and set up a fortified post, called "Mishlat" in Hebrew, on a hill overlooking Beit Shemesh, within the Arab village Dayr Aban.
[citation needed] Beit Shemesh is the point from which the so-called Convoy of 35 set out to bring provisions to besieged Gush Etzion.
(An earlier version, that the soldiers were discovered by an Arab shepherd who they graciously let go, was based on a eulogy written by Ben-Gurion and is apparently apocryphal).
The bones of animals found in the 12th–11th centuries BCE layer indicate a diet typical of the Israelites who inhabited the hill country in this period.
[3] In August 2012, archaeologists from Tel Aviv University announced the discovery of a circular stone seal, approximately 15 millimetres in diameter.
According to Haaretz, "excavation directors Prof. Shlomo Bunimovitz and Dr. Zvi Lederman of Tel Aviv University say they do not suggest that the human figure on the seal is the biblical Samson.
Haaretz reports that "According to Bunimovitz, when the pork-eating Philistines arrived in the country from the Aegean, the local people stopped eating pork to differentiate themselves from the newcomers.
[28] National Roads Company of Israel agreed to significantly reduce the width of Route 38, which crosses Tel Beit Shemesh, after archaeologists warned that it might bury rare and unusual artifacts from the First Temple period that were discovered there.
So far it has been claimed that the city of Beit Shemesh was destroyed during the campaign to suppress Hezekiah's rebellion by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BC,[30][31] and that the lowland area was torn from the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Judah.
However, the new discoveries showed that after its destruction the settlement was re-founded on the eastern slopes of the tel, and was used As an important administrative and economic center of the Kingdom of Judah under the rule of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
According to Lederman's hypothesis, the site west of Beit Shemesh was a row of royal agricultural farms, which Hezekiah established mainly to produce olive oil.
The salvage excavation indicates that, contrary to the accepted view, according to which the Judean plain was emptied of its Jewish population in the seventh century BC, Beit Shemesh had a high-level built settlement with a sophisticated and profitable industry.
[34] In 2014, archaeologists Irene Zilberbod and Tehila Libman announced the nearby discovery of a large compound from the Byzantine period that was most probably a monastery.
