Gath

Gath was one of the five principal Philistine cities, a fortified town in the lowlands between the hill country of Judah and the coastal plain, whose name in Hebrew means “winepress.” Scripture lists it among the Philistine city-states with their rulers: “the five lords of the Philistines; the Gazites, and the Ashdodites, the Ashkelonites, the Gittites, and the Ekronites” (Joshua 13:3), and Amos groups it with Calneh and Hamath as a city worth comparing against Israel’s own confidence (Amos 6:2). The gentilic “Gittite” simply identifies a person by origin in Gath, as with “Goliath of Gath” (1 Samuel 17:4) and Ittai the Gittite, who pledged to follow David wherever he went (2 Samuel 15:21).

The text says Gath was the home of the Philistine champion Goliath (1 Samuel 17:4) and of the four descendants of “the giant in Gath” who fell by the hand of David and his servants (2 Samuel 21:22); the battle narrative traces the Philistine rout back “to Gath and to Ekron” (1 Samuel 17:52). David twice took refuge with Achish king of Gath (1 Samuel 21:10), and his lament over Saul and Jonathan turns the city into a place where news must not be published: “Don’t tell it in Gath” (2 Samuel 1:20). Later, Uzziah king of Judah “broke down the wall of Gath” along with those of Jabneh and Ashdod (2 Chronicles 26:6), a sign that the city’s independence had already been worn down by the wars between Judah, Israel, Philistia, and Aram.

Historically and linguistically, the exact site is not certain, though the mound of Tell es-Safi in the Shephelah is the leading candidate among archaeologists; that identification is a scholarly judgment, not something the biblical text states. A related question of language attaches to 2 Samuel 8:1, where David is said to have taken “the bridle of the mother city out of the hand of the Philistines”: the Hebrew phrase meteg ha’ammah is read by some as a common expression and by others as a place name, Metheg-ammah, and an old interpretive tradition connects it with Gath as the Philistine “mother city,” which is why the two names are sometimes listed together.

Among Christian traditions the difference is mainly in how the city is read. Historically oriented readings treat Gath as a real, locatable Philistine town and weigh the archaeological and textual evidence for its site. Homiletical and literary readings have often taken “tell it not in Gath” (2 Samuel 1:20) as a pattern for grief that refuses to hand the enemy a occasion to gloat, and some traditions read Gath typologically as standing for the hostile world. Others note that the surviving Hebrew text of 1 Samuel 17:4 gives Goliath’s height as six cubits and a span while the Septuagint and a Dead Sea Scrolls witness give four cubits and a span, and treat that textual question as separate from the historicity of the place itself.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.