Makaz

Makaz appears once in Scripture in the catalog of Solomon's twelve administrative districts that rotated supplying the royal court: "The son of Dekar, in Makaz, and in Shaalbim, and Beth-shemesh, and Elon-beth-hanan" (1 Kings 4:9). Ben-deker's second district encompassed the western Shephelah cluster of Makaz, Shaalbim, Beth-shemesh, and Elon-beth-hanan — the foothills between the Judean highland and the Philistine coastal plain. The reorganization broke up the older tribal boundaries in favor of a more efficient fiscal grid, but the precise site of Makaz remains unidentified by archaeology, somewhere in the western Judean foothills near Beth-shemesh.