Valley of Elah
— — the valley where a boy picked up five smooth stones.
Not only on a wall.
“A broad chalk valley in the Judean foothills, about thirty kilometres southwest of Jerusalem. The book of First Samuel sets the David and Goliath account here, with Philistine and Israelite armies camped on opposing ridges. The valley is named for the terebinth tree, elah in Hebrew, which still shades the wadi where the brook ran. Wheat fields fill the floor each spring. — from the studio
Valley of Elah, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Valley of Elah is a broad east-west wadi in the Shephelah, the chalk-and-limestone foothills between the Judean mountains and the coastal plain. It runs through Israel's Adullam Region, about thirty kilometres southwest of Jerusalem and twenty kilometres east of Ashkelon. The floor sits at roughly 250 metres elevation and is drained by Nahal HaElah, the seasonal brook on its southern edge. Two biblical-period sites mark its mouths: Tel Azekah at the western entrance, excavated since 2012 by Tel Aviv University, and Tel Socoh on the southern ridge. Wheat fills the valley floor each spring.
The wadi cuts through soft Eocene chalk overlain by harder Senonian flint, which is where the smooth stones in the streambed come from: water-rounded flint pebbles roughly the size of a hen's egg. First Samuel 17 has David choose five of them from the brook. Tel Azekah, the mound at the western mouth, rises about forty metres above the valley floor and has been occupied since the Early Bronze Age. The site is named in Joshua 10 and again on the Lachish Letters, a set of ostraca written in Hebrew on the eve of the Babylonian siege in 587 BC.
The valley is on Route 38 in the Adullam-France Park, an Israeli national park co-managed by the Jewish National Fund. The road crosses the streambed at a low concrete bridge where most visitors stop, walk the gravel bar, and pick up flint pebbles. Tel Azekah is signposted from the highway and reached by a short trail to the summit; the view takes in the full valley and the Philistine plain beyond. The wildflower bloom in February and March, with red anemones and yellow mustard, is when the valley is busiest with Israeli families.