Researchers from four leading Israeli universities have developed a method that is based on the Earth’s magnetic field to confirm a significant event described in the Old Testament – invasion of GAT Khazael, the king of Aramais. This method is based on the measurements of the magnetic field in burned bricks, which allows you to get key information about ancient construction practices, including the scale of fires and destruction in Gata, an important city of that time.
A study published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE provides a technique that allows archaeologists to determine and evaluate the burned materials on excavations and evaluate the temperature of their firing. This method allows you to identify firing events even at relatively low temperatures, starting from 200°C.
The work was led under the leadership of Dr. Joava Vaknin from Tel Aviv University and the Paleomagnetic Laboratory of the Jewish University. The study was also attended by Professor Ron Shaar, Erez Ben-Yosef, and Odda Lipshitz from various institutions, as well as Dr. Adi Eliah-Bukhar from the University of Ariel and Professor Mair from the University of Bar-Yila.
The technique is based on the measurement of the magnetic field imprinted in the burned brick during its heating and subsequent cooling. Magnetic particles are aligned with the Earth’s field when heated, preserving this orientation after cooling. The effectiveness of the method is confirmed by subjecting bricks to controlled fires and then gradual demagnetization in the Paleomagnetic Laboratory, which proves the reliability and exact determination of firing temperatures up to 200°C.
In addition, this approach also allows you to determine the orientation of the cooling of bricks, which is important to distinguish whether the bricks were burned before construction or during a destructive event. This discovery helped to resolve the dispute relative to the brick structure in the TV-Es-Safi, identified as the ancient Philistine city of GAT, mentioned in the Old Testament.
Applying their method to samples from this design and its wreckage, the researchers finally found that all the bricks were fired on the spot during the disaster, which corresponds to the biblical narrative and refutes previous interpretations that the brick firing took place before construction.
This breakthrough not only confirms historical stories but also sheds
