This site, in fact, lies only a half-day’s walk from the ancient port of Gaza, and the church is located along an ancient Roman road that led from the coast to Beer Sheva, the Negev’s main city.
According to the excavation directors — Dr. Oren Shmueli, Dr. Elena Kogan-Zehavi, and Dr. Noé David Michael on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, together with Professor Deborah Cvikel of the University of Haifa’s Department of Maritime Civilizations — it is reasonable to think that Christian pilgrims traveled this road to reach the Christian holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and the monasteries in the Negev hills and in the Sinai.
“It is reasonable that their first stop after alighting from the ships in Gaza port was this very church revealed in our excavations south of Rahat,” the scholars said.
The ships drawn on the rock “are a greeting from Christian pilgrims arriving by ship to Gaza port,” the excavation directors said. “Pilgrims [who] visited the church left their personal mark in the form of ship drawings on its walls. The ship is indeed an old Christian symbol, but in this case, apparently, it is a true graphical depiction of real ships in which the pilgrims traveled to the Holy Land.”
