Bible Lands

“Few travelers who rush across the [coastal] plain realize that the first conspicuous hill they pass in Palestine is also one the most thickly haunted, even in that narrow land into which history has crowded itself.”

Gazing on the modest hill that Tel Gezer, gateway to the Aijalon Valley, the great geographer of the Holy Land, George Adam Smith,¹ continued his reflections about all those who passed through or fell in the Shephelah (pronounced shfay-lá in modern Hebrew, and ha shfay-lá if preceded by the definite article, as almost always in the Bible;² the term is still in use):