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At the remains of an ancient metropolis in southern Israel, archaeologists are piecing together the history of a people remembered chiefly as the bad guys of the Hebrew Bible.
The city of Gath, where the annual digging season began this week, is helping scholars paint a more nuanced portrait of the Philistines, who appear in the biblical story as the perennial enemies of the Israelites.
A ceramic shard found at the excavation site in Tel el-Safi
Close to three millennia ago, Gath was on the frontier between the Philistines, who occupied the Mediterranean coastal plain, and the Israelites, who controlled the inland hills. The city’s most famous resident, according to the book of Samuel, was Goliath – the giant warrior improbably felled by the young shepherd David and his slingshot.
The Philistines “are the ultimate other, almost, in the biblical story,” said Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation.
The latest summer excavation season began this past week, with 100 diggers from Canada, South Korea, the United States and elsewhere, adding to the wealth of relics found at the site since Maier’s project began in 1996.
In a square hole, several Philistine jugs nearly 3,000 years old were emerging from the soil. One painted shard just unearthed had a rust-red frame and a black spiral: a decoration common in ancient Greek art and a hint to the Philistines’ origins in the Aegean.
The Philistines arrived by sea from the area of modern-day Greece around 1200 B.C. They went on to rule major ports at Ashkelon and Ashdod, now cities in Israel, and at Gaza, now part of the Palestinian territory known as the Gaza Strip.
At Gath, they settled on a site that had been inhabited since prehistoric times. Digs like this one have shown that though they adopted aspects of local culture, they did not forget their roots. Even five centuries after their arrival, for example, they were still worshipping gods with Greek names.
Archaeologists have found that the Philistine diet leaned heavily on grass pea lentils, an Aegean staple. Ancient bones discarded at the site show that they also ate pigs and dogs, unlike the neighboring Israelites, who deemed those animals unclean – restrictions that still exist in Jewish dietary law.
Diggers at Gath have also uncovered traces of a destruction of the city in the 9th century B.C., including a ditch and embankment built around the city by a besieging army – still visible as a dark line running across the surrounding hills.
The razing of Gath at that time appears to have been the work of the Aramean king Hazael in 830 B.C., an incident mentioned in the Book of Kings.
Gath’s importance is that the “wonderful assemblage of material culture” uncovered there sheds light on how the Philistines lived in the 10th and 9th centuries B.C., said Seymour Gitin, director of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and an expert on the Philistines.
That would include the era of the kingdom ruled from Jerusalem by David and Solomon, if such a kingdom existed as described in the Bible. Other Philistine sites have provided archaeologists with information about earlier and later times but not much from that key period.
“Gath fills a very important gap in our understanding of Philistine history,” Gitin said.
In 604 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invaded and put the Philistines’ cities to the sword. There is no remnant of them after that.
Crusaders arriving from Europe in 1099 built a fortress on the ruins of Gath, and later the site became home to an Arab village, Tel el-Safi, which emptied during the war surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948. Today Gath is in a national park.
The memory of the Philistines – or a somewhat one-sided version – was preserved in the Hebrew Bible.
The hero Samson, who married a Philistine woman, skirmished with them repeatedly before being betrayed and taken, blinded and bound, to their temple at Gaza. There, the story goes, he broke free and shattered two support pillars, bringing the temple down and killing everyone inside, including himself.
One intriguing find at Gath is the remains of a large structure, possibly a temple, with two pillars. Maeir has suggested that this might have been a known design element in Philistine temple architecture when it was written into the Samson story.
Diggers at Gath have also found shards preserving names similar to Goliath – an Indo-European name, not a Semitic one of the kind that would have been used by the local Canaanites or Israelites. These finds show the Philistines indeed used such names and suggest that this detail, too, might be drawn from an accurate picture of their society.
The findings at the site support the idea that the Goliath story faithfully reflects something of the geopolitical reality of the period, Maeir said – the often violent interaction of the powerful Philistines of Gath with the kings of Jerusalem in the frontier zone between them.
“It doesn‘t mean that we’re one day going to find a skull with a hole in its head from the stone that David slung at him, but it nevertheless tells that this reflects a cultural milieu that was actually there at the time,” Maeir said.
A collection of lead booklets, allegedly found in a cave in Jordan, made headlines earlier this month. The media pounced on the booklets and declared that they were evidence of early Christian history. The lead codices, bound with lead rings, supposedly included a picture of Jesus and a map of Jerusalem. An Aramaic scholar has since examined pictures of the codices and has called them forgeries. Regardless of whether the codices are legitimate or not, the whole matter raises the importance of provenance and the difficulty in determining the authenticity of archeological artifacts when they’ve been taken away from the original site of discovery.
The 70 lead codices were supposedly found by a Jordanian Bedouin between 2005 and 2007. BBC wrote, “They could be the earliest Christian writing in existence, surviving almost 2,000 years in a Jordanian cave. They could, just possibly, change our understanding of how Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and how Christianity was born.”
If these codices are truly the earliest Christians writing in existence, they would be any archeologist’s dream find. Are they, though? Are the codices legitimate or are they an involved set of fakes?
Archeology enthusiast David Elkington has been leading a British team working to recover the codices from their current Israeli owner and put them in a Jordanian museum. Elkington is impressed with the drawings found on the covers and some of the pages of the lead booklets that have been opened, pictures he argues include images of a menorah and Jesus in the presence of God.
Philip Davies, Emeritus Professor of Old Testament Studies at Sheffield University, was impressed with a picture map of the holy city of Jerusalem, according to the BBC. “As soon as I saw that, I was dumbstruck. That struck me as so obviously a Christian image,” said Davies. “There is a cross in the foreground, and behind it is what has to be the tomb [of Jesus], a small building with an opening, and behind that the walls of the city. There are walls depicted on other pages of these books too and they almost certainly refer to Jerusalem.”
The director of the Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, Ziad al-Saad, told the BBC that the books might have been made by early Christians in the decades after the crucifixion.
On the other hand, Dr. Peter Thonemann, a specialist in Greek inscriptions at Wadham College, Oxford, says the codices are fakes. In fact, they aren’t even good fakes but are phonies that “any expert would see through in five or 10 minutes.” Thonemann argues the codices were forged within the past 50 years.
Professional Aramaic translator Steve Caruso also decided the codices were contrived. Antiquities dealers often ask Caruso to analyze inscriptions on ancient artifacts, and he says he spent a week examining photographs of the codices.
“I noticed there were a lot of Old Aramaic forms that were at least 2,500 years old,” Caruso told Life’s Little Mysteries. “But they were mixed in with other forms that were younger, so I took a closer look at that and pulled out all the distinct forms that I could find. It was very, very odd — I’ve never seen this kind of mix before.” The youngest scripts dated to the second and third centuries after Christ, Caruso said, which proved the codices could not have been made at the dawn of Christianity.
The person who did the writing was not careful, Caruso noted, flipping letters around and using improper stroke order when writing the letters.
The squabble over the codices hasn’t stopped there. Plenty of arguments can be found on both sides. Early Christians were not necessarily well educated, which would indicate why the codices included many pictures and few words. Also, the lead codices were cast rather than carved. This means that if the letters were originally made with forward strokes, but were pressed into the ground or some other soft substance in order to make copies, then the hot lead for the cast would have been poured into a mirror image of the original. They would come out looking flipped backwards. Letters that Caruso considered Nabatean and young could also be interpreted as Hebrew and older.
The battle continues as those on both sides attack each other’s credentials. Kimberley Bowes, a Greek and Roman archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania has rejected David Elkington’s credentials as an archeologist, saying, “He doesn’t seem to occupy any post or other academic position.”
For his part, Elkington has criticized Dr. Thonemann, saying: “He’s not a biblical scholar, he’s a Greek classicist. Dismissing the provenance of the books on the basis of two low resolution photographs by e-mail is out of order.”
For its part, the Israel Antiquities Authority doubts the legitimacy of the booklets as “a mixture of incompatible periods and styles without any connection or logic.”
Provenance: The provenance of the books is the big issue, though. It’s difficult to tell exactly where they originated. Thonemann’s argument that they are just 50 years old is fairly thin, considering he has not seen the codices in person nor run any tests on them. At least Elkington photographed the codices firsthand. Yet, the Israeli collector who now possesses the codices argues that they’ve been in his family for over 100 years, contradicting the story that the lead booklets were found in a remote cave in Jordan between four and six years ago.
One of the most painful issues in archeology is that of provenance – the careful documentation of the discovery and ownership history of any artifact. Provenance often means the difference between a priceless piece of history and a piece of junk. It’s the difference between a $10,000 show dog and a mutt. Any time relic-hunters pull an artifact from the sands of the Holy Land and sell it to hungry collectors without carefully documenting how and where they found it, without getting experts involved to verify those facts, they destroy most of the historical value of the artifact. There are plenty of fakes out there, because antiquities offer big money. Without solid documentation, it is very difficult to shut the mouths of critics who argue an artifact is a clever (or not so clever) forgery.
The first rule for all amateur archeologists is to not remove an artifact from its find location. These codices are interesting, but because they lack solid documentation, it is difficult to trust the historical value of their lead pages.
For scholars of faith and history, it is a treasure trove too precious for price.
This ancient collection of 70 tiny books, their lead pages bound with wire, could unlock some of the secrets of the earliest days of Christianity.
Academics are divided as to their authenticity but say that if verified, they could prove as pivotal as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947.
On pages not much bigger than a credit card, are images, symbols and words that appear to refer to the Messiah and, possibly even, to the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Adding to the intrigue, many of the books are sealed, prompting academics to speculate they are actually the lost collection of codices mentioned in the Bible’s Book Of Revelation.
The books were discovered five years ago in a cave in a remote part of Jordan to which Christian refugees are known to have fled after the fall of Jerusalem in 70AD. Important documents from the same period have previously been found there.
Initial metallurgical tests indicate that some of the books could date from the first century AD.
This estimate is based on the form of corrosion which has taken place, which experts believe would be impossible to achieve artificially.
If the dating is verified, the books would be among the earliest Christian documents, predating the writings of St Paul.
The prospect that they could contain contemporary accounts of the final years of Jesus’s life has excited scholars – although their enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that experts have previously been fooled by sophisticated fakes.
David Elkington, a British scholar of ancient religious history and archeology, and one of the few to have examined the books, says they could be ‘the major discovery of Christian history’.
‘It is a breathtaking thought that we have held these objects that might have been held by the early saints of the Church,’ he said.
But the mysteries between their ancient pages are not the books’ only riddle. Today, their whereabouts are also something of a mystery. After their discovery by a Jordanian Bedouin, the hoard was subsequently acquired by an Israeli Bedouin, who is said to have illegally smuggled them across the border into Israel, where they remain.
However, the Jordanian Government is now working at the highest levels to repatriate and safeguard the collection. Philip Davies, emeritus professor of biblical studies at Sheffield University, said there was powerful evidence that the books have a Christian origin in plates cast into a picture map of the holy city of Jerusalem.
As soon as I saw that, I was dumbstruck,’ he said. ‘That struck me as so obviously a Christian image. There is a cross in the foreground, and behind it is what has to be the tomb [of Jesus], a small building with an opening, and behind that the walls of the city.
‘There are walls depicted on other pages of these books too and they almost certainly refer to Jerusalem. It is a Christian crucifixion taking place outside the city walls.’
The British team leading the work on the discovery fears that the present Israeli ‘keeper’ may be looking to sell some of the books on to the black market, or worse – destroy them.
But the man who holds the books denies the charge and claims they have been in his family for 100 years.
Dr Margaret Barker, a former president of the Society for Old Testament Study, said: ‘The Book of Revelation tells of a sealed book that was opened only by the Messiah.
‘Other texts from the period tell of sealed books of wisdom and of a secret tradition passed on by Jesus to his closest disciples. That is the context for this discovery.’
Professor Davies said: ‘The possibility of a Hebrew-Christian origin is certainly suggested by the imagery and, if so, these codices are likely to bring dramatic new light to our understanding of a very significant but so far little understood period of history.’
Mr Elkington, who is leading British efforts to have the books returned to Jordan, said: ‘It is vital that the collection can be recovered intact and secured in the best possible circumstances, both for the benefit of its owners and for a potentially fascinated international audience.’
SINAI ARTIFACTS INSCRIBED WITH ISRAEL’S GOD RESURFACE
The Egyptian revolution has provided more than just the impetus for the Libyans to oust Gaddafi. It has brought to light Hebrew artifacts from the Sinai, hidden away by the Egyptians for more than thirty years.
Israel took advantage of the time it held control of the Sinai to excavate important archeological sites. Tel Aviv University archeologist Ze’ev Meshel unearthed artifacts bearing the name of YHWH from the ruins of Kuntillet Ajrud, an ancient way station in the northern part of the peninsula. Then came heartbreak for the Israeli archeologists; the1979 peace agreement included terms that required Israel to hand over the finds from the Sinai, and these important pieces of the past were hidden away in Egypt.
After the children of Israel were taken captive into Babylon, they began to take on the writing and vocabulary of the Babylonians. The change in the Hebrew text of the Bible is quite distinct. The first month of the Hebrew calendar is called “Abib” during the time of Moses (Exd 34:18; Deu 16:1), but after the Babylonian captivity, it is called “Nisan” (Neh 2:1; Est 3:7). The actual lettering used by the Hebrews was changed to the Babylonian form. This is important to appreciate. A popular scholastic position contends that the Torah was not written down until the Exile. Yet, when the pre-exile Scriptures contain only the older vocabulary and none of the new, it presents evidence that the writing was indeed done prior to the Babylonian captivity.
Several of the artifacts from Kuntillet Ajrud bear on them inscriptions in paleo-Hebrew, the pre-Babylonian form of Hebrew. They also include references to YHWH, the personal name of the God of Moses. One of the finds Ze’ev Meshel discovered in the 1970s was a 400-pound stone bowl , on which was written in paleo-Hebrew, “(Belonging) to Ovadiah, son of Adnah, may he be blessed by Yahwe[h].”
Other inscriptions demonstrate the syncretism that the prophets so constantly spoke against. Ze’ev Meshel also had excavated two tall storage vessels with one inscription that refers to “Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah.” Another inscription refers to “Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah.” Still other inscriptions refer to Ba’al.
Yahweh v. Asherah
Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter, focuses on Israel’s preoccupation with the asherah poles and the Canaanite fertility religions. She goes on to make the case that these sorts of inscriptions show that Yahweh had a wife.
“Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife,” says Stavrakopoulou.
Edward Wright, president of both The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research believes that the fact of God’s wife was kicked out by male chauvinism.
“Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors,” he added. “Traces of her remain, and based on those traces, archaeological evidence and references to her in texts from nations bordering Israel and Judah, we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant.”
Asherah was not edited out of the Bible at all, contrary to what Wright argues. The fertilty goddess is mentioned 40 times in the Hebrew, and Yahweh made clear from Exodus that the Israelites were to get rid of the Canaanites’ asherah poles. (The Hebrew word “asherah” is translated “grove” in the King James.) Apparently Yahweh didn’t want Asherah for His wife.
“But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves. For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: Lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods, and do sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice;” (Exd 34:13-15).
Archeologists often note that there was a mixture of religious traditions in ancient Israel, and that’s no surprise; the Bible tells us just that. The LORD told the Israelites to cut down the asherah of the Canaanites, and yet the Israelites did not fully do so. In fact, many began to worship the very gods of the people God had sent them to destroy. During the time of the Judges, Yahweh told Gideon to cut down his father’s asherah and to throw down his altar of Baal.
“But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.” (Deut 7:5) “And it came to pass the same night, that the LORD said unto him [Gideon], Take thy father’s young bullock, even the second bullock of seven years old, and throw down the altar of Baal that thy father hath, and cut down the grove, that is by it: (Judges 6:25)
Sadly, the Israelites were still provoking Yahweh to anger by worshiping the “queen of heaven” during the time of Jeremiah (Jer 7:18; 44:17-25).
Troubling as they are theologically, syncretistic inscriptions like those on the storage vessels confirm the Bible’s account of the nation’s poor spiritual condition before the captivity, and even before the monarchy. Yet, the artifacts have been stuck in an Egyptian storage facility for over 30 years.
After the 1979 peace agreement, the artifacts from Kuntillet Ajrud were handed over to Egypt and then not seen again. After the archeological stores at Qantara on the eastern side of the Suez were looted recently, it was feared these items would be sold cheaply to the far corners of the globe. It turned out, however, that 30 truckloads of items, including the Sinai artifacts, had been moved from Qantara to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. They may still not be displayed, but at least we know where they are.
Israeli epigraphers will publish on the inscriptions, with the contribution of Ze’ev Meshel, the original excavator. It may be 35 years after the excavation that the publication finally comes out, but, in these sorts of cases, it’s better late than never.
Archaeologists in Israel believe they may have stumbled upon the tomb of the biblical Prophet Zechariah in a newly discovered church.
The church, which is more than 1,300 years old, contains massive marble columns as well as exquisite mosaics, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement.
Archaeologists believe that the church, uncovered in Hirbet Madras in central Israel, is the location marked on the Madaba Map as the tomb of Zechariah, according to Haaertz.
The Madaba map is an ancient mosaic map of the region that includes modern Israel. It was found in a sixth-century church in Jordan.
“The researchers believe that in light of an analysis of the Christian sources, including the Madaba Map, the church at Hirbet Madras is a memorial church designed to mark the tomb of the prophet Zechariah,” the IAA said.
The agency stressed that this is just a theory and requires more research for confirmation.
“This issue will be examined and studied in the near future,” the IAA said.
Zechariah is believed to have lived around 500 B.C., according to the website of the Vatican Museums. The book of Zechariah speaks of the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon as well as the coming of the Messiah.
The archaeologists began excavating the site following a robbery there, Haaertz said. It was the first dig at the site, even though a piece of a doorway had been spotted poking out of the ground there in the 1980s.
Months of diggings led to the church, which is about the size of a basketball court.
To the archaeologists’ surprise, they found that the church sits on what looks like a structure from the Roman era, as well as a large complex of caves and tunnels used by Jewish rebels fighting the Romans during the Bar Kokhba revolt of A.D. 132.
Besides the ancient church, archaeologists found coins, stone vessels, lamps and ancient pottery.
“There is no doubt the discovery is extraordinary and of great importance in terms of research, religion and tourism,” the IAA said, according to Agence France-Presse.
Folks who want to take a little side trip to see King Tut on their next vacation will still be able to do so, for now at least. The boy king is still on display, and DNA testing should soon prove whether he is the father of stillborn babies buried with him. The Valley of the Kings near Luxor in Egypt is visited by 9000 curious people every day, and King Tutankhamun’s tomb has been one of the most popular attractions. As much as people love catching a glimpse into ancient history, however, access to antiquities can be limited, and King Tut’s tomb will not be readily available to visit forever.
A $10 million project called the “Valley of the Replicas” is in the works in Egypt. Rather than visiting the actual tombs as in times past, visitors will enter exact replicas. There are 63 burial spots in the Valley of the Kings, and visitors will first be able to go into reproduction of the tomb of King Tut, as well as those of King Seti I and Queen Nefertari, whose burial sites have already been closed to the public. The real tombs will remain available for entry, yes, but only for those able to pay thousands of dollars for the opportunity. Even now, access to King Tut’s tomb is limited to 1000, visitors each day.
The Cyrus Cylinder:
Meanwhile, the Cyrus Cylinder will remain on display in Iran for another three months. The famous clay cylinder of Cyrus the Great describes how he set the Jews free from their captivity in Babylon and helped them to rebuild Jerusalem (as prophesied in Isaiah 45). Those who want to view the cylinder in the land of ancient Persia can do so until April 15th. After mid-April, the British Museum should be taking the cylinder back into possession. Those who would prefer to view this amazing piece of history in an English-speaking country far from the ayatollahs should be free to do so.
The British archeologist Hormuz Rassam discovered the Cyrus Cylinder in 1879 while excavating the foundations of the main temple of Babylon. The cylinder’s descriptions offer valuable corroborating evidence of the Biblical account of the return of the exiles from Babylon in the 6th century BC (Ezra 1:1-11).
Jesus’ Baptism: The traditional spot on the Jordan River where John the Baptist baptized Jesus Christ was officially opened to the public in a ceremony on January 18. Thousands of Christians went down the banks of the Jordan last Tuesday and submerged themselves in its waters in the same place it is believed that Jesus himself was baptized.
There has been concern over pilgrims visiting the site in the recent past, because the location is surrounded by hundreds of landmines. According to the Israeli military, though, the baptism site and associated churches are in a “completely mine-free zone,” and “no danger is posed to tourists or worshippers.”
“The (military) regularly clears away minefields in the Jordan River Valley, and in the last year alone approximately 8,000 mines have been removed from the area,” the military said in a statement.
We may not all get to hunt down the Ark of the Covenant like Indiana Jones, but we do have the freedom to walk up the Mount of Olives where Jesus himself taught the disciples. We are able to visit Egypt and see the land of the Pharaohs, where the children of Israel were held in bondage until God delivered them through Moses. We can travel to Iran – or to the British Museum – and see for ourselves the precious piece of written history in the Cyrus Cylinder, one that corresponds to one of the most obviously specific prophecies of the Old Testament (Isaiah 44:28-45:6, 13). There’s still a great deal of the ancient world around to explore, and a visual understanding of that world adds a tremendous sense of the reality of the human history found in the Bible.
Whenever the Western media reports on archaeology in Jerusalem, it generally refers to excavations as controversial and discoveries as inconclusive. Consider the 60 Minutes report that aired this past Sunday: “Controversy in Jerusalem: The City of David.” It’s controversial for Jews to purchase homes, build parks or excavate in the ancient City of David, we learn from the report, because there is an Arab neighborhood there that might be included in a future Palestinian state.
While visiting the City of David, CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl seemed bothered by the large number of Israeli soldiers who visit the park.
“It’s part of their cultural day to try to learn about what they’re fighting for,” explained Doron Spielman, the site’s international director of development.
But Stahl doesn’t see it that way at all. She accused Israel of using the archaeology site as a political tool to indoctrinate its soldiers. There is an “implicit message” in what tour guides tell the many thousands of visitors, Stahl explained—“that because David conquered the city for the Jews back then, Jerusalem belongs to the Jews today.”
Of course, there is nothing implied or sneaky about the way Jews explain their own history. David did conquer the city of Jerusalem 3,000 years ago. Jerusalem did serve as the capital of an internationally renowned kingdom during the reigns of David and his son Solomon. Even after the kingdom of Israel divided, Jerusalem remained as capital of the southern kingdom of Judah for more than three centuries.
The Davidic dynasty ended in 585 b.c., after the Babylonians, led by King Nebuchadnezzar, attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple Solomon had built. The people of Judah, the Bible relates, were carried away captive out of their own land (Jeremiah 52:27).
Seventy years later, King Cyrus of Persia commissioned a small band of Jews, during the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, to return to Jerusalem in order to rebuild the temple and the walls surrounding the city (2 Chronicles 36:22-23). Ezra records a total of 42,360 Jewish exiles who left Babylon for Jerusalem in order to help rebuild the city.
During the Second Temple period, the Jews living in the Holy Land were granted autonomy within the Persian Empire. Their independence, however, came under constant fire from Hellenistic invaders and, later, the Romans.
In 37 b.c., the Roman Empire installed Herod as king over Judea. A little more than 40 years later, Judea became a Roman province. The Jewish presence in Jerusalem, however, remained strong for much of the first century, as the New Testament relates.
Jesus, of course, was Jewish. So were His disciples. In fact, the early New Testament church was almost entirely composed of Jewish converts. These Christians, together with Jewish resistance movements, were scattered abroad in a.d. 70, when Roman forces razed the city of Jerusalem and destroyed the temple entirely, just as Jesus had prophesied (Matthew 24:2).
The Jews briefly wrested control of Jerusalem from Rome during the Bar Kochba revolt in a.d. 132-135. But the Romans eventually squashed the rebellion and expelled all Jews from the city. Since then, control over Jerusalem has repeatedly changed hands. Constantine turned it into a Christian center during the fourth century. Muslim armies invaded the city in the seventh century. Crusaders conquered it in 1099. The Mamluks from Egypt ruled Jerusalem beginning in 1250, before the Ottoman Turks began their four-century rule over the city in 1517. Britain conquered Jerusalem in 1917 and ruled the city until 1948 when, in accordance with a United Nations resolution, the Jews declared independence as the nation of Israel and made Jerusalem their capital city.
“Since the destruction of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago,” Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat said in a recent speech, “nobody’s ever declared Jerusalem as their capital. None—not the Crusaders, the Jordanians, the Turks, the Brits, the Mamluks—none of them have ever declared Jerusalem as their capital. Only the Jewish people.”
This is because the Jews alone have always laid claim to Jerusalem as their historic capital, dating back to the days of King David. This history, which predates the establishment of Christianity by 1,000 years—and Islam by 1,700 years—is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, where Jerusalem is referred to more than 650 times.
Small wonder, then, that wherever archaeologists dig in Israel today, they nearly always uncover Israelite artifacts and history!
For CBS, though, these findings are sparse and inconclusive. Leslie Stahl said, “It’s controversial that the City of David uses discoveries to try to confirm what’s in the Bible, particularly from the time of David, the king who made Jerusalem his capital.”
What archaeologists have found in Jerusalem from the time of King David just doesn’t add up, CBS said in its report. For all the talk about King David, Stahl asserts, there is actually “no evidence” of his rule in Jerusalem!
In fact, the evidence is piling higher by the day. In 1986, for example, Dr. Eilat Mazar found a large stone gateway complex between the Temple Mount and the City of David. It was constructed sometime during the First Temple period and probably served as one of the main entrances to the temple buildings constructed by Solomon.
In 1993, a team of archaeologists digging in northern Israel uncovered a ninth-century b.c. stone tablet bearing a clear reference to the “House of David” and “King of Israel.” The author of the inscription boasts of having defeated both the king of Israel and the king of Judah—the latter monarch being a descendant of the “House of David.” Even Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberstein—two notable skeptics, when it comes to archaeological discoveries that confirm the biblical record—could not ignore the significance of the Tel Dan tablet. They wrote in 2001, “Thus, the house of David was known throughout the region; this clearly validates the biblical description of a figure named David becoming the founder of the dynasty of Judahite kings in Jerusalem.”
A year after the Tel Dan stele was found, a French scholar examining the Moabite Stone in the Louvre Museum discovered another reference to the “House of David.” On the stone, Mesha, the king of Moab mentioned in 2 Kings 3, is praised for capturing territory previously controlled by the “House of David.”
A year after the Moabite Stone made headlines, in 1995, a construction crew broke ground on a new visitors’ center above the Gihon Springs at the City of David. Not long after they started the project, workers were startled to find a wealth of archaeological remains buried just beneath the surface. Construction was immediately halted in favor of a massive archaeological dig.
Excavations later unearthed the remains of a massive fortress compound built during the Jebusite age, before David conquered the city. Towers were built to defend the city’s principle water supply at the Gihon Springs. These excavations also confirmed that the vast underground water system, leading from the springs to inside the walled city, actually pre-dated David. This is significant because the Bible says King David’s forces conquered the Jebusite fortress by sneaking into the city through a tunnel (2 Samuel 5:8).
Three centuries after David captured the Jebusite fortress that became ancient Jerusalem, one of his descendants, King Hezekiah of Judah, carved another tunnel into the rock beneath the City of David—this one 1,700 feet in length. According to 2 Chronicles 32, Hezekiah built the tunnel to protect Jerusalem’s water supply in case King Sennacherib’s Assyrian forces attacked from the north. The “conduit” is also mentioned in 2 Kings 20:20 and is corroborated by Sennacherib’s own written account of his campaign to conquer Jerusalem.
In 1880, a Jewish boy discovered an inscription carved inside the tunnel that reads, “While the excavators were still lifting up their picks, each toward his fellow, and while there were yet three cubits to excavate, there was heard the voice of one calling to another, for there was a crevice in the rock, on the right hand. And on the day they completed the boring, the stonecutters struck pick against pick, one against the other, and the water flowed from the spring to the pool.”
Hezekiah’s tunnel, which is one of the most popular tourist sites in Jerusalem today, was cut through the bedrock underneath the City of David more than 2,700 years ago by a king who descended from the house of David.
Another popular site to see at the City of David is the palace of King David. That project started in the mid-1990s when Eilat Mazar noticed this important detail from 2 Samuel 5:17: “Now when the Philistines heard that they had anointed David king over Israel, all the Philistines went up to search for David. And David heard of it and went down to the stronghold” (New King James Version). This, Dr. Mazar surmised, indicated that David’s palace stood on higher ground than the Jebusite fortress he barricaded himself into.
Based upon the biblical account, we know that once David conquered the Jebusite city, he took up residence in the stronghold—or the fortress at the north end of the city. He then set out to enlarge the city limits, beginning with the construction of a new palace (2 Samuel 5:9-11).
Not long after David completed his palace, the Philistines attacked. And since the new palace may not have been fortified strongly enough to withstand a direct attack, David went down to the citadel, which was safer.
Dr. Mazar published her theory in Biblical Archaeology Review in January 1997. She wrote, “Careful examination of the biblical text combined with sometimes unnoticed results of modern archaeological excavations in Jerusalem enable us, I believe, to locate the site of King David’s palace. Even more exciting, it is in an area that is now available for excavation. If some regard as too speculative the hypothesis I shall put forth in this article, my reply is simply this: Let us put it to the test in the way archaeologists always try to test their theories—by excavation.”
In 2005, Dr. Mazar finally obtained financial backing for the project and began excavating an area measuring about 300 square meters at the north end of the City of David. She later uncovered the remains of a “Large Stone Structure”—a wall running east-west that she believed to be the northern facade of David’s palace.
Only 10 percent of the structure was exposed during the first phase of digging. But it was enough for Mazar to conclude that this was not just a house—but a “fantastic house.” Her most revealing conclusion, however, is drawn from the relationship between the Large Stone Structure and the Stepped Stone Structure on the city’s northeastern slope: “It can already be said with some certainty that the two are part of a single, enormous building complex. The Stepped Stone Structure, so it appears, was built as a gigantic, well-devised supportive structure that allowed for the erecting of a great podium on which the Large Stone Structure, which is identified with King David’s palace, would be built” (The City of David Excavations, 2005).
Within the palace, Dr. Mazar also found a bulla bearing the inscription, “Jehucal, son of Shelemiah.” He is mentioned in Jeremiah 37 and 38 as being a royal officer in the court of King Zedekiah, the last king of Judah to rule in Jerusalem.
The Jehucal bulla is not the only inscription found that is directly related to the Davidic dynasty. In 1982, the late Yigal Shiloh found a collection of 53 bullae located at the bottom of the Stepped Stone Structure, just below the palace platform Dr. Mazar has been excavating. One bulla from Shiloh’s collection was inscribed with the Hebrew name, “Gemariah son of Shaphan,” who is mentioned in Jeremiah 36:10. He was one of the princes of Judah during Jehoiakim’s reign. His father, Shaphan, worked for King Josiah (2 Kings 22:3).
Writing in 2005, Dr. Mazar noted, “The congruity of the biblical text with the names of these two officials [Gemariah and Jehucal] appearing on bullae from the City of David is not only astounding but, more importantly, instructive on the great importance and accuracy of the biblical source.”
In 2007, Dr. Mazar began an emergency dig near the top of the Stepped Stone Structure in order to repair a collapsing tower. As we have written before, what started as a reconstruction project quickly turned into a fascinating collection of new discoveries. Under the tower, she found a rich assemblage of pottery and other finds. After dating the pottery, Mazar concluded that the tower must have been built by Nehemiah after the Jews returned from Babylonian captivity to rebuild the temple and repair the walls around Jerusalem.
Included underneath Nehemiah’s tower were numerous remains and artifacts, including another bulla—this one bearing the name “Gedaliah the son of Pashur.” He was one of Jeremiah’s chief accusers who served in King Zedekiah’s administration. He is mentioned in Jeremiah 38.
It seems there’s no end to the many astounding discoveries that continue to turn up! And to think—Jerusalem has been besieged by Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Crusaders, Mamluks, Turks and Brits. It’s been repeatedly ransacked and pillaged, burned and torn down, buried by heaps of ruins—even purged of its Jewish inhabitants.
And yet, the deeper archaeologists go, the more Jewish history they uncover! It’s astounding when you think of it.
The recent decoding of a cryptic cup, the excavation of ancient Jerusalem tunnels, and other archaeological detective work may help solve one of the great biblical mysteries: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
The new clues hint that the scrolls, which include some of the oldest known biblical documents, may have been the textual treasures of several groups, hidden away during wartime—and may even be “the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple,” which held the Ark of the Covenant, according to the Bible.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 60 years ago in seaside caves near an ancient settlement called Qumran. The conventional wisdom is that a breakaway Jewish sect called the Essenes—thought to have occupied Qumran during the first centuries B.C. and A.D.—wrote all the parchment and papyrus scrolls.
But new research suggests many of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated elsewhere and were written by multiple Jewish groups, some fleeing the circa-A.D. 70 Roman siege that destroyed the legendary Temple in Jerusalem.
“Jews wrote the Scrolls, but it may not have been just one specific group. It could have been groups of different Jews,” said Robert Cargill, an archaeologist who appears in the documentary Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls, which airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel.
The new view is by no means the consensus, however, among Dead Sea Scrolls scholars.
“I have a feeling it’s going to be very disputed,” said Lawrence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University (NYU).
Dead Sea Scrolls Written by Ritual Bathers?
In 1953, a French archaeologist and Catholic priest named Roland de Vaux led an international team to study the mostly Hebrew scrolls, which a Bedouin shepherd had discovered in 1947.
De Vaux concluded that the scrolls’ authors had lived in Qumran, because the 11 scroll caves are close to the site.
Ancient Jewish historians had noted the presence of Essenes in the Dead Sea region, and de Vaux argued Qumran was one of their communities after his team uncovered numerous remains of pools that he believed to be Jewish ritual baths.
His theory appeared to be supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, some of which contained guidelines for communal living that matched ancient descriptions of Essene customs.
“The scrolls describe communal dining and ritual bathing instructions consistent with Qumran’s archaeology,” explained Cargill, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Dead Sea Scrolls: “Great Treasure From the Temple”?
Recent findings by Yuval Peleg, an archaeologist who has excavated Qumran for 16 years, are challenging long-held notions of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Artifacts discovered by Peleg’s team during their excavations suggest Qumran once served as an ancient pottery factory. The supposed baths may have actually been pools to capture and separate clay.
And on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion, archaeologists recently discovered and deciphered a two-thousand-year-old cup with the phrase “Lord, I have returned” inscribed on its sides in a cryptic code similar to one used in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
To some experts, the code suggests that religious leaders from Jerusalem authored at least some of the scrolls.
“Priests may have used cryptic texts to encode certain texts from nonpriestly readers,” Cargill told National Geographic News.
According to an emerging theory, the Essenes may have actually been Jerusalem Temple priests who went into self-imposed exile in the second century B.C., after kings unlawfully assumed the role of high priest.
This group of rebel priests may have escaped to Qumran to worship God in their own way. While there, they may have written some of the texts that would come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Essenes may not have abandoned all of their old ways at Qumran, however, and writing in code may have been one of the practices they preserved.
It’s possible too that some of the scrolls weren’t written at Qumran but were instead spirited away from the Temple for safekeeping, Cargill said.
“I think it dramatically changes our understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls if we see them as documents produced by priests,” he says in the new documentary.
“Gone is the Ark of the Covenant. We’re never going to find Noah’s Ark, the Holy Grail. These things, we’re never going to see,” he added. “But we just may very well have documents from the Temple in Jerusalem. It would be the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple.”
Dead Sea Scrolls From Far and Wide?
Many modern archaeologists such as Cargill believe the Essenes authored some, but not all, of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Recent archeological evidence suggests disparate Jewish groups may have passed by Qumran around A.D. 70, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, which destroyed the Temple and much of the rest of the city.
A team led by Israeli archaeologist Ronnie Reich recently discovered ancient sewers beneath Jerusalem. In those sewers they found artifacts—including pottery and coins—that they dated to the time of the siege. (Related: “Underground Tunnels Found in Israel Used In Ancient Jewish Revolt.”)
The finds suggest that the sewers may have been used as escape routes by Jews, some of whom may have been smuggling out cherished religious scrolls, according to Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Importantly, the sewers lead to the Valley of Kidron. From there it’s only a short distance to the Dead Sea—and Qumran.
The jars in which the scrolls were found may provide additional evidence that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of disparate sects’ texts.
Jan Gunneweg of Hebrew University in Jerusalem performed chemical analysis on vessel fragments from the Qumran-area caves.
“We take a piece of ceramic, we grind it, we send it to a nuclear reactor, where it’s bombarded with neutrons, then we can measure the chemical fingerprint of the clay of which the pottery was made,” Gunneweg says in the documentary.
“Since there is no clay on Earth with the exact chemical composition—it is like DNA—you can point to a specific area and say this pottery was made here, that pottery was made over here.”
Gunneweg’s conclusion: Only half of the pottery that held the Dead Sea Scrolls is local to Qumran.
Scroll Theory “Rejected by Everyone”
Not everyone agrees with the idea that Dead Sea Scrolls may hail from beyond Qumran.
“I don’t buy it,” said NYU’s Schiffman, who added that the idea of the scrolls being written by multiple Jewish groups from Jerusalem has been around since the 1950s.
“The Jerusalem theory has been rejected by virtually everyone in the field,” he said.
“The notion that someone brought a bunch of scrolls together from some other location and deposited them in a cave is very, very unlikely,” Schiffman added.
“The reason is that most of the [the scrolls] fit a coherent theme and hang together.
“If the scrolls were brought from some other place, presumably by some other groups of Jews, you would expect to find items that fit the ideologies of groups that are in disagreement with [the Essenes]. And it’s not there,” said Schiffman, who dismisses interpretations that link some Dead Sea Scroll writings to groups such as the Zealots.
UCLA’s Cargill agrees with Schiffman that the Dead Sea Scrolls show “a tremendous amount of congruence of ideology, messianic expectation, interpretation of scripture, [Jewish law] interpretation, and calendrical dates.
“At the same time,” Cargill said, “it is difficult to explain some of the ideological diversity present within some of the scrolls if one argues that all of the scrolls were composed by a single sectarian group at Qumran.”
Caves Were for Temporary Scroll Storage?
If Cargill and others are correct, it would mean that what modern scholars call the Dead Sea Scrolls are not wholly the work of isolated scribes.
Instead they may be the unrecovered treasures of terrified Jews who did not—or could not—return to reclaim what they entrusted to the desert for safekeeping.
“Whoever wrote them, the scrolls were considered scripture by their owners, and much care was taken to ensure their survival,” Cargill said.
“Essenes or not, the Dead Sea Scrolls give us a rare glimpse into the vast diversity of Judaism—or Judaisms—in the first century.”
- Prophecy News Watch
An ongoing archaeological excavation in Tel Tzafit continues to unearth the ruins of what was once the city of Gat – described in the Bible as the hometown of Goliath. Professor Aren Maeir, who is directing the dig, spoke to Arutz Sheva’s Hebrew-language news service to discuss the latest finds.
Recent finds from the Tel Tzafit excavation are “fascinating,” Maeir said. The site, inhabited at times by Canaanites and at other times by Philistines, has remnants from many periods of history. “We are focusing on the Canaanite period, the Philistine period, and the Israelite period, and for now we’re primarily in the Philistine period,” he said.
One of the most interesting finds was a piece of writing containing, among other things, Philistine names, some of which were similar to the name “Goliath.”
“We’ve found a rich variety of artifacts” showing that Gat was a major city at that time, he continued. “We are now discovering remnants from metal craft and bronze, and from the destruction of the city at the hands of King Chazel of Aram as described in the second books of Kings.”
Findings show that Chazel and his army laid siege to the city until its residents had exhausted their food supply, then attacked. Dozens of buildings were found that were demolished by the invading army.
Other buildings appear to have collapsed in an earthquake, possibly the one mentioned at the beginning of the book of Amos, he said.
The relationship between the nation of Israel and the Philistines was more complex than people tend to assume, Maeir revealed. “The Philistines… were often more than just enemies. We can see this in the Bible as well, for instance, in the fact that Samson married a Philistine woman,” he said. There appears to have been crossover between the two cultures – for example, findings show that elements of Philistine cooking became common among the Israelites as well.
- Prophecy News Watch
ISRAEL: AN ARCHAEOLOGIST’S PARADISE
The Holy Land sits on thousands of years worth of human history. The stories hidden under Israel’s soil are not only important to anthropologists and historians, but also to the religious faithful of several religions. On any given day of the year, dozens of archaeological digs are carefully uncovering the physical remnants of ancient civilizations. While any one discovery might have great historical, religious, or political significance, we keep a look out for those discoveries that add insight to the Biblical text. Here are a few of some interesting recent finds:
Ancient Beekeeping
God told Moses in Exodus 3:8 that He would free the Israelites from Egypt and take them into a land “flowing with milk and honey.” While many think this refers to honey made from dates and figs, ancient beehives found in northern Israel demonstrate that honeybees were cultivated there 3,000 years ago. The hives, made of straw and unbaked clay, were lined up in orderly rows in what must have been a serious honey production plant in the middle of the thriving city of Rehov. As many as 100 hives might have fit in the room. The hives had a hole in the front through which the bees entered and left, and a door in the back through which bee tenders could collect wax and honey.
Another find next to the beehives – an altar decorated with fertility figures – also speaks volumes about Israel’s constant battle against idol-worship and the Canaanite fertility religions. While the Israelites might have taken over the land flowing with milk and honey, they also adopted many of the Canaanites’ religious practices (for which they were repeatedly judged).
King Herod’s Quarry
After the Babylonian captivity, the Israelites returned and rebuilt the holy Temple in Jerusalem since it had been destroyed in 586 B.C.. Several hundred years later, King Herod (the same King Herod who tried to murder the infant Jesus) renovated and expanded the Second Temple.
Archaeologists have recently discovered a massive quarry, which they believe is the source of the massive stones on the Temple Mount. Coins and pottery found at the site date the quarry to the time of Herod, and the quarry is located just 2 1/2 miles northwest of the Old City. A number of quarries have been found in the area, but this is the first to be considered the source for the construction of the Temple Mount, including the Western Wall. From it were cut beautiful white 5-7 ton stones resembling marble – stones strong enough to support the Temple Mount for thousands of years.
X-Raying The Dead Sea Scrolls
Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are too delicate to unroll and study, which until recently has kept researchers from reading all of their contents. The scrolls contain texts from the Bible as well as information on the way of life of the Essene community that lived in the area from about the Second Century B.C. to the First Century A.D.
Through the use of powerful x-rays and digital technology, however, the secrets of the fragile scrolls may soon be exposed. Because the ink used in the scrolls contained iron, the words can be detected using an x-ray technology that – while about 100 billion times brighter – is similar to the x-ray technology used to detect our bones. By taking x-rays of the parchments from several angles and feeding the information into a computer, the computer can analyze the jumbled material from the x-rays and piece the words together into readable text. The technique has been successfully used to translate some Scottish texts, and scientists hope that soon the technology will be used to reveal the contents of the final Dead Sea Scrolls.
While archaeologists love to put together puzzles from the ancient world using bits of clay and rock and art found in the dust, we know that there is a more reliable way to know the history of the Holy Land. Scribes for thousands of years painstakingly made copies of the history of the land of Israel, and the prophecies and works of the God of Israel. It is that God whose Son lives in our hearts, and continues to make an impact on our lives today because He rose again from the place where he was buried – after just 3 days, and not 3000 years.
Related Links:
• Archaeologists Discover Ancient Beehives in Israel – AP
• Israeli Archaeologist May Have Found Tomb of King Herod – AP
• Archeologists Find 2nd Temple Quarry – The Jerusalem Post
• Super X-rays Could Unravel Dead Sea Scrolls – Breaking News
- FROM: Koinonia House News Letter
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