Eshtaol

Eshtaol was a town of the Shephelah, the lowland foothills between the Judean hill country and the Philistine plain, and it is almost never named without its twin, Zorah. The two towns frame the whole Samson story: the Spirit of the LORD first stirred him "in Mahaneh-dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol" (Judges 13:25), and after his death "his brothers and all his family came down and took him and brought him up and buried him between Zorah and Eshtaol in the tomb of Manoah his father" (Judges 16:31). The name is usually explained from the Hebrew root "to ask", though older dictionaries offered "narrow pass" or "recess".

Biblical Account

Eshtaol appears twice in the town lists of Joshua. The Judahite list places it first among the lowland towns: "And in the lowland, Eshtaol, Zorah, Ashnah" (Joshua 15:33). The seventh lot, for the tribe of Dan, opens with the same pair, "Zorah, Eshtaol, Ir-shemesh" (Joshua 19:41), Ir-shemesh being another name for Beth-Shemesh. Interpreters have read the double listing in more than one way: as border towns shared by the two tribes, or as Judahite towns in which Danite families were permitted to settle; Judges 1:34 records that the Amorites "pressed the people of Dan back into the hill country".

The town's own Danites are the actors in Judges 18. The tribe "sent five able men from the whole number of their tribe, from Zorah and from Eshtaol, to spy out the land" (Judges 18:2). The spies returned "to their brothers at Zorah and Eshtaol" (Judges 18:8), reported that the land around Laish was "very good" (Judges 18:9), and "600 men of the tribe of Dan, armed with weapons of war, set out from Zorah and Eshtaol" (Judges 18:11). Their first camp, west of Kiriath-jearim, was named Mahaneh-dan, "the camp of Dan" (Judges 18:12), the same name the Samson narrative attaches to the ground between the two towns. The march ended with the capture of Laish, renamed Dan (Judges 18:27-29; Joshua 19:47, where the city is called Leshem). A later notice lists "the Zorathites and the Eshtaolites" among the clans of Kiriath-jearim descended from Judah through Hur (1 Chronicles 2:53), which suggests that Judahite families occupied both towns once the Danites had gone north.

Samson Country

Samson was born to Manoah, "a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites" (Judges 13:2), so Eshtaol was the eastern edge of his home ground, late in the Period of the Judges, about 1075 BC. The place record ends where his did: the family tomb between the two towns (Judges 16:31). The narrative of his life and death belongs to the entry on Samson and Delilah.

Geography and Identification

Eshtaol lay on the high ground north of the Sorek valley, where the valley opens from the Judean hills into the Shephelah; the valley is the natural corridor from the Philistine plain up toward Jerusalem. Eusebius, writing in the fourth century AD, still knew a village called Eshtaol in the district of Eleutheropolis (Beth Guvrin), ten Roman miles north of that city, and the fourteenth century Jewish topographer Estori ha-Parchi was the first to identify it with the village of Ishwa, roughly three kilometres east-north-east of Zorah (Tel Tzora) and four to five kilometres north-east of Beth-Shemesh. The modern moshav of Eshtaol was founded on the lands of Ishwa in 1949.

The site identification is debated among biblical archaeologists. The usual candidate is Tell Abu el-Qabus (Khirbet Deir Abu Qabus), on the hill above the old village, where Iron Age remains have been recorded; this rests partly on the Iron Age remains recorded there and partly on the view that the village name "Ishwa" preserves the ancient name. An alternative proposal places the biblical town at Khirbet Deir Shubeib, about three kilometres to the north-west. Neither site has been excavated in a way that settles the question, so the identification is best classed as probable for the general locality and possible for either specific mound. Excavation by the Israel Antiquities Authority near the moshav in 2013 uncovered a structure of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, about 10,000 years old, but that find belongs to the deep prehistory of the Sorek valley rather than to the biblical town.