Places of the Bible
Beth-shan
Where the name appears
Events told in passages that name Beth-shan, and how many of their verses do. That is not the same as saying they happened here: a place can be named as a landmark, as somewhere being travelled to, or as the subject of a prophecy.
A dot is a moment; a bar is something that lasted, drawn to its length. The fainter the mark, the fewer verses name the place.
- Death of Saul · 1054 BC · 2 verses
- Reign of David · 1054 BC · 1 verse
What the spade found
Beth-shan is generally identified with Tel Bet She'an, a tell — a mound raised by one settlement built on the ruins of the last. It has been excavated, and at its largest covered 4 hectares.
Occupation shows in 16 dated phases: Chalcolithic, Early Bronze Age IB, Early Bronze Age II, Early Bronze Age III, Early Bronze Age IV/Middle Bronze Age I/Int. Bronze, Middle Bronze Age II-III, Late Bronze Age I, Late Bronze Age II, Late Bronze Age III, Iron Age I, Iron Age IIa, Iron Age IIb, Iron Age IIc, Hellenistic, 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.
Named in 3 verses
The place, its people and its events come from Theographic, a knowledge graph of the Bible by Robert Rouse, used and shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.