Zorah

Zorah was a hill town of the Shephelah, the low hill country between the Judean highlands and the Philistine coastal plain, overlooking the Sorek Valley about 23 km west of Jerusalem. Joshua lists it among the lowland towns of Judah (Joshua 15:33) and again in the allotment of Dan, beside Eshtaol and Ir-shemesh (Joshua 19:41). It is best known as the home of Manoah and the birthplace of Samson, and it later appears among the cities Rehoboam fortified (2 Chronicles 11:10) and among the villages resettled by the people of Judah after the exile (Nehemiah 11:29).

Biblical Account

The book of Judges opens the Samson story with "a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah," whose wife was barren (Judges 13:2), during the forty years in which the Lord gave Israel into the hand of the Philistines (Judges 13:1). The Spirit of the Lord first began to stir Samson "in Mahaneh-dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol" (Judges 13:25), and after his death at Gaza his brothers and family brought his body back and buried him "between Zorah and Eshtaol in the tomb of Manoah his father" (Judges 16:31). Zorah and Eshtaol are paired again when the tribe of Dan, still without a settled inheritance, sent five men from the two towns to spy out the land (Judges 18:2); on their return six hundred armed Danites set out from Zorah and Eshtaol for Laish in the far north, the city they renamed Dan (Judges 18:8-11, 29). The Chronicler's genealogies record clans of Zorathites descended from Kiriath-jearim (1 Chronicles 2:53; 4:2) and Zorites among the sons of Salma (1 Chronicles 2:54), which fits the town's position on the border of Judah and Dan. Early in his reign (930 to 913 BC) Rehoboam included Zorah in his line of fortified cities with Aijalon, Azekah, Lachish and Adullam, stocking them with commanders, food, oil, wine, shields and spears (2 Chronicles 11:5-12). After the return from Babylon, Zorah was among the villages where the people of Judah lived (Nehemiah 11:29).

Geography and Identification

Zorah is identified with Tel Tzora, the hill on which the Arab village of Sar'a stood until its depopulation in 1948, at about 350 m above sea level on the north side of Nahal Sorek (Wadi es-Sarar), roughly 3 km north of Tel Beth Shemesh and under 2 km southwest of Eshtaol (Eshwa). The Arabic name Sar'a preserves the consonants of the Hebrew Zorah, and the site's position between Beth Shemesh and Eshtaol matches every biblical reference; the identification is established and is not disputed. The King James Version spells the name Zoreah in Joshua 15:33 and Zareah in Nehemiah 11:29. An ancient road from Jerusalem to the coast ran west through Eshtaol close by, and Zorah looked directly across the Sorek Valley toward Philistine territory.

Historical Context

Zorah appears to be attested in the fourteenth century BC, early in the period of the judges. Among the Amarna Letters, EA 273, written to Pharaoh by a Canaanite ruler who calls herself the Lady of the Lions, reports that the Apiru had written to Ayyaluna and to Sarha and that two sons of Milkilu of Gezer barely escaped being killed. Sarha is generally read as Zorah and Ayyaluna as Aijalon, the same pair Rehoboam later fortified together. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia cites the same letter under Petrie's number 265 with the spelling Tsarkha. The town's shifting tribal label, listed for Judah in Joshua 15 and for Dan in Joshua 19, reflects Dan's failure to secure its allotment and the migration of much of the tribe northward (Judges 18), after which Zorah remained a town of Judah.

Archaeology

Tel Tzora has not been the subject of a large-scale excavation; what is known comes from the Survey of Western Palestine in the 1870s, later Israeli surveys and small salvage digs. The hilltop and its slopes hold rock-cut tombs, cisterns, cup marks, a cave the later villagers used as an oil press, and two rock-hewn winepresses, one paved with mosaic. East of the tell at the foot of the hill, a large rock-cut altar first reported by J. E. Hanauer in 1885, about 3 m by 2.5 m and 1.5 m high with cup marks and connecting grooves on its upper surface, has been nicknamed "Manoah's altar" after the offering Manoah made on a rock (Judges 13:19); the nickname is a modern tradition, not an identification, and the altar is undated. A domed shrine of Neby Samat stood on the hill until the 1950s; the Survey of Western Palestine noted that it seems to be the tomb shown to the Jewish traveller Isaac Chelo as Samson's in AD 1334, and local tradition made Samat a brother of Samson, whose own shrine was shown at Eshwa; a pair of caves on the summit have likewise been pointed out as the tombs of Samson and Manoah. None of these traditions can be tested. An Israel Antiquities Authority survey of the forest around the tell in 2003 recorded plastered cisterns, cave dwellings and three winepresses, the largest an industrial installation whose treading floor was set with white mosaic tesserae, and dated them by the sherds embedded in their plaster to the Byzantine period; a salvage dig on the north edge of the tell in 2008 uncovered a small rock-hewn winepress and an olive-press crushing basin that yielded no datable pottery. Eusebius in the fourth century AD still knew the village as Saraa, ten Roman miles north of Eleutheropolis on the road to Nicopolis, and a Second Temple period ritual bath was excavated in 2011 about 2 km north of Kibbutz Tzora, away from the tell. The Bronze and Iron Age levels of the tell itself, the periods of the town's biblical record, await excavation. Tel Beth Shemesh across the valley, extensively excavated, supplies the best archaeological picture of the district in the period of the judges.

Theological Significance

Zorah and Eshtaol frame Samson's whole life: the Spirit first stirred him between the two towns, and between them his family laid him in his father's tomb. The town's record, from the Danite departure to Rehoboam's fortress to the post-exilic village, traces a border settlement that changed tribal hands within Israel yet never dropped out of the biblical story.