What the spade found

Bene-berak is generally identified with Tel Bene Beraq, a tell — a mound raised by one settlement built on the ruins of the last. It has been surveyed but not excavated, and at its largest covered 2.5 hectares.

Occupation shows in 6 dated phases: Middle Bronze Age, Late Bronze Age, Iron Age I-II, Iron Age III (Persian), Roman, Byzantine.

The excavation is from the survey dataset From Villages to Empires (Zanoni and others, 2025), used under CC BY 4.0. The identification is the one modern scholarship settles on, compiled by OpenBible.info from over seventy works, also under CC BY 4.0. Identifying a mound with a biblical name is a scholarly judgement, and for some places it is still debated.