Just saw on fox news that archeologists have discovered the actual home of Goliath!  I'm sure more info will come.  The hometown was in the city of gath.  

They've actually known where Gath is for a while, but a new round of excavations just began. :) Here is a Fox News article about it, though I disagree with some (most) of the conclusions in it. http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/07/11/in-israel-archaeologists-unearth-bibles-bad-guys/?test=faces

Thanks for posting the link, Masi. I'm curious about your statement that you disagree with some conclusions. Those of Fox or of the Israeli archaeologist?

Reading the article, I think it's Fox I'm disagreeing with. The archeologists' statements were mostly just to say, "We haven't found anything that contradicts what we thought about the Philistines." It's the history and origins of the Philistines that the writer gives which are dubious.

We know Goliath's name (and by extension the Philistine language) is not Semitic, but the article is claiming his name and other fragments of the Philistine language are Indo-European. I don't know where they're getting that from because we don't know how to read the Philistine's writings nor do we know how the language was spoken. The article is also claiming that the Philistines crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Greece based on design motifs from recovered pottery. The problem is that we don't have any records or where the Philistines came from before settling in Canaan. It's possible that the Philistines descended from Greek colonists, but it's just as likely that they dealt with Greek seafaring traders. If they were Greek, why didn't they speak any (recognizable) Greek dialect? Finally, the article plainly says that the Philistines worshiped gods with Greek sounding names, but we know that the Philistines pantheon was made up up borrowed Canaanite gods such as Baal with names that appear to be cognates.

Sorry guys,
 You obviously know a lot more about the subject.  Just caught it on the tube and thought it was worth mentiong.  Thanks for the incite though.

Mail man

I had no clue about this latest round of digging. I'm a little obsessed with Biblical History so I know all of the theories about Goliath and the Philistines, but I'm always looking for the latest finds. If you see/hear anything else about the dig please post it! :D

I agree with M. You can't go drawing conclusions based on early finds. I help out at a Pleistocene dig, and the site is so scrambled, you can't make concrete sense of it. Even after 27 years, we still don't a lot about it. We know there was some kind of fire, but we don't know how it was started.  
 So, it's non professional to be spewing out this stuff.
Then again, it's Fox News.

slingbadger wrote on Jul 12^th, 2011 at 6:35am:

Then again, it's Fox News.

That's something to inscribe in marble.
Greetings,
Mauro.