Beit She'an sits at the junction of the Jezreel Valley and the Jordan Valley — the strategic crossroads where the east-west route from the Mediterranean to Transjordan meets the north-south route along the Jordan. The mound itself is one of the largest tells in Israel, with twenty occupation strata reaching back to the fourth millennium BC. Clarence Fisher and Alan Rowe directed the University of Pennsylvania expedition from 1921 to 1933, exposing the Late Bronze and Iron Age strata at the summit. Yigael Yadin worked the site briefly in the 1950s. Amihai Mazar of the Hebrew University led the renewed Beit She'an Valley Archaeological Project from 1989 to 1996, and the lower-city Roman excavations under Gabriel Mazor and Rachel Bar-Nathan have continued through the present. Two layers carry the biblical weight. The Late Bronze Age strata produced the Egyptian governor's residence — Beit She'an served as the southern administrative anchor of the Egyptian New Kingdom presence in Canaan from the fifteenth through the twelfth centuries BC. Two royal stelae of Seti I and one of Ramesses II were recovered with their hieroglyphic inscriptions intact, naming the city as an Egyptian provincial seat. After the Egyptian withdrawal, the city passed to the Philistines through the eleventh century BC. 1 Samuel 31:10–13 records that after the battle of Mount Gilboa, the Philistines fastened the bodies of Saul and his sons to the wall of Beit She'an — the men of Jabesh-Gilead crossed the Jordan by night to recover them. The lower city below the tell became the Hellenistic-Roman Scythopolis — the leading city of the Decapolis (Matthew 4:25; Mark 5:20) and the only Decapolis city west of the Jordan. The Roman cardo, theater, bathhouses, and temple precinct, exposed across thirty acres, were leveled by the great Galilee earthquake of January AD 749. The site is open as Beit She'an National Park; the Egyptian stelae are at the Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem. Sources: Frances James and Patrick McGovern, The Late Bronze Egyptian Garrison at Beth Shan (University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1993); Amihai Mazar, Excavations at Tel Beth-Shean 1989–1996, three volumes (Israel Exploration Society, 2006–2012); Gabriel Mazor and Rachel Bar-Nathan, Bet She'an I: Nysa-Scythopolis (Israel Antiquities Authority, 2011); 1 Samuel 31:10–13.
Beit She'an anchors three distinct biblical-historical periods within a single site: the Egyptian New Kingdom provincial administration attested by intact royal stelae of Seti I and Ramesses II, the Philistine occupation linked to 1 Samuel 31, and the Roman Decapolis city referenced in the Synoptic Gospels.