Ekron

Ekron, ancient Canaanite and Philistine city and one of the five cities of the Philistine pentapolis. It has been identified with Tel Miqne (Arabic: Khirbat al-Muqannaʿ), south of the village of Mazkeret Batya, central Israel, since the mid-19th century. While some scholars in the 20th century suggested Qidron (Arabic: Qaṭra), a site 3 miles (5 km) south of Mazkeret Batya, as ancient Ekron, a dedicatory inscription found in the late 1990s at Tel Miqne solidified the identification of the site with the ancient city. In the Hebrew Bible, Ekron is allocated to Judah after the Israelite conquest (Joshua 15:11), but it is a Philistine stronghold in David’s time (1 Samuel 17:52). During the time of King Ahaziah of Israel, it is associated with the worship of the deity Baalzebub (“Baal of the Flies”; though some would read instead Baal-zebul, or “Baal of the Abode”; 2 Kings 1:2–18). Taken by Egyptian Pharaoh Sheshonk I, the biblical Shishak, in the course of his conquest of Palestine (c. 918 bce), it was later tributary to Esarhaddon and his son Ashurbanipal, kings of Assyria (7th century bce). The city was known as Akkaron, or Accaron, in Hellenistic and later times, and the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (flourished 4th century) mentions the existence of a Jewish population there during his lifetime.

By the late Middle Ages, Ekron had been abandoned; unlike other Philistine cities, such as Ashkelon and Ashdod, no tell (or mound) bore its name throughout the centuries, though it survived in the Arab village of ʿĀqir, which was first identified with Ekron by the 19th-century American biblical scholar Edward Robinson. In 1883 Baron Edmond de Rothschild founded a Jewish agricultural settlement adjoining ʿĀqir, which he named Mazkeret Batya (Hebrew: “Memorial [to] Batya”), in honor of his mother. Days before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War the Haganah depopulated ʿĀqir. Israel subsequently named the village Ekron (now officially Kiryat Ekron) and settled it with new immigrants from Bulgaria and Yemen.