Overview

Bibliography

'Izbet Sartah is a small Iron Age site located on a small hill overlooking the coastal plain, at the western fringes of the hill country. The site is approximately 3 kilometers east of Aphek. The site was discovered in 1973 and subsequently excavated (1976-1978) by M. Kochavi and I. Frinklestine for Tel Aviv University and Bar Ilan University. The site has been identified with Ebenezer, but there are several other Iron I period sites in the vicinity. The site attests to early Israelite settlement in the area – the material culture of the site is similar to the settlements in the central hill country – and perhaps scribal activity. An inscribed ostracon with five lines in the so-called "proto-Canaanite" script was discovered in a silo. Four of the line are undecipherable, and perhaps are simply random letters representing scribal practice, but one line is a fully abecedary.

Three levels of short-lived settlements were uncovered in the excavations. The earliest settlement (Stratum III, twelfth century BCE) consisted of a series of rooms arranged in an oval covering an area of half an acre. The complex of rooms was entered through a narrow opening in the north, and all the rooms were entered from the large central courtyard. This settlement was apparently abandoned. The second settlement (Stratum II, eleventh century BCE), consisted of a large four-room house in the center of the site and several smaller houses on the periphery. This settlement, which only lasted a couple of decades before it was also abandoned, is characterized by 43 stone-lined silos. The final settlement (Stratum I, tenth century BCE) was also short-lived, and was essentially a rebuilding and expansion of the central four-room house. The inscription was found in one of the silos associated with the large four-room house of Stratum II.

The archaeological strata uncovered at the site, as illustrated in the site plan, date to the following periods:

	Tenth Century BCE
	Eleventh Century BCE
	Twelfth Century BCE