Also known as Beth-shan, the city is best remembered in the Old Testament as the place where the Philistines fastened the bodies of Saul and his sons on the wall after they had been killed in battle (1 Sam 31:10-12); the bodies were later retrieved by the courageous men of Jabesh-gilead (1 Sam 31:11-12) and reinterned on David's instruction in the tomb of Saul's father in Zela of Benjamin (2 Sam 21:12-14).
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The city was allotted to the tribe of Manasseh (Jos 17:11; Chron 7:29), though they never seemed to have taken possession of it, and it remained in Canaanite hands (Jos 17:16; Judg 1:27) until the time of Solomon (1 Ki 4:12). It was of no particular significance during Old Testament times. Its place in the politics and economy of Solomon's empire is not known.
The paucity of interest in the city reflected in the Old Testament, however, belies its importance. With a continuous occupation of some 6,000 years, it was located at the start of the Harod Valley, with its fertile soil and a perennial stream (something rare and precious in an arid land) and easy access into the Jezreel Valley and the coast, just a few kilometers from the ford across the Jordan, and not much further from the Sea of Galilee, Beth-shean was well placed to control the east-west trade since its earliest days. Pharaoh Thutmose III made it one of his administrative centers in the 15th Cent., and it remained an important center of Egyptian influence for the next three centuries. With the arrival of the Israelites in the land and its occupation by the Canaanites, the history of the city becomes obscured, until the 3th Cent BC when it reappeared with a new name, Scythopolis, 'city of the Scythians.' How and why the Scythians came to be associated with the city remains, for the moment, a mystery.
The city was alternatively razed to the ground, rebuilt and forced to convert to Judaism by the Hasmoneans, it was captured by Pompey in 63 BC and made incorporated into the Decapolis, a league of ten cities intended as centers of Roman power and influence in the region. Despite its importance at the time, the New Testament makes no mention of Bethshean in any of its pages. In the 2nd Cent AD it became the base of the Roman Sixth Legion Ferrata, and soon a well-known center of linen production. Though it was made capital of the Byzantium province in the 4th Cent, economic decline set in soon afterwards, hastened even more by an earthquake in 749.
Beth-shean has been the focus of massive archaeological excavation for a good many years, and is on-going.
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