You may recognize the phrase that is the title of this post. The phrase “Dan to Beersheba” or the reverse is used nine times in the Old Testament to refer to the limits of Israelite settlement.

During my trip to Israel for the dig at Lachish I was able to visit both places.

The first night after we left our dig lodgings was spent at Arad which is near the Dead Sea. In one of the courtyards was a large relief map of Israel. This view is looking from the north.

I really liked this map as you could really see the topography of Israel and the importance of the different valleys and passes throughout the country.

In this picture Dan is marked by by a green circle and Beersheba is marked by the red circle.

This picture shows the gate area of Tel Be’er Sheva. This city was visited by Abraham and is also known as the City of Abraham. I used this picture in my post Arad to Ashkelon.

A couple days later we were at Tel Dan and here is a picture of the Caananite gate from the Bronze Age. This gate is also known as the Abraham Gate as Abraham may have went through it after he rescued Lot.

See my post North of Galilee II for more about northern Israel.

I also checked the distance between the two cities with Google maps. I chose the walk icon and found that it would be close to 300 kilometers and take a little more than 60 hours to walk between the two cities. If you walked 12 hours a day you could make it in about 5 days.

There were several suggested routes between Tel Be’er Sheva and the Tel Dan Reserve. Using the new north/south highway 6 it would only take about three hours to make the journey.

Traveling through the Jordan Valley would take more than four hours.

When you include the Negev and travel all the way down to Eilat then a north/south journey through Israel would take about five and a half hours.

You could easily drop Israel into the Central Valley of California and have a lot of room left over.

Steven