Immediately after sending off Report no.6, a number of important finds were announced, particularly at the Seminar on 28th October at the Hebrew University, so here goes.
Eilat Mazar continues to make new discoveries at the City of David site. The latest is an underground water tunnel (partly plastered) that ran under the building, which she calls The Large Stone Structure, which appears to have fed a nearby pool. It debouched onto the hillside and was deliberately blocked (and still is) at a later date. From pottery and two broken lamps, Mazar dates it to the Early Iron Age, and speculated that it may have served to help Joab, David’s general, to penetrate into and conquer Jebus, pre-Israelite Jerusalem, by way of the ‘tzinnor’ (2 Sam.5:8), but that is not yet by any means established. At a later date the tunnel may have served as an escape route for those fleeing from the Babylonian destruction of 586 BCE.
The find of a shard from Khirbet Qeiyafa (perhaps ‘Ruin Beautiful’) in the Elah Valley, southwest of Jerusalem, has raised enormous interest. It is inscribed with five lines of an early Canaanite script, a precursor of Palaeo-Hebrew. The excavator, Yossi Garfinkel of the Hebrew University, claims this to be the earliest Hebrew inscription yet found as he thinks that the first line contains at least two Hebrew words, ‘Al Ta’aseh (do not make…)’, but no full reading has yet been made of the shard. The find was made in the cooking area of a house alongside the six-chambered gate of this 23-dunam (6-acre) town, on a hilltop site overlooking the Elah Valley, where conflicts were fought between the Philistines and the kingdoms of Saul and David, according to the biblical record. It was built in the Early Iron Age but occupation ceased shortly afterwards, judging by the pottery. After a long interval it was re-occupied in the early Hellenistic period, during the Ptolemaic occupation of Palestine, then called Coele-Syria. The evidence for the latter comes from coins found on site. The find of the shard was made in the second season of the dig. It is planned to continue for several more years to uncover the central area of this walled hilltop town.
Further news on Khirbet Qeiyafa: Yossi Garfinkel has just announced that there was a second gate to the city, which was not obvious as it had been built over in Hellenistic times. For an Iron-Age town to have had two gates was most unusual; it was a unique feature. He points out that the site lies between the better-known towns of Azekah and Socoh. In Joshua 15:36 there is a town called Sha’arayim (which means ‘two gates’), mentioned together with the two sites of Azekah and Socoh. It is referred to again in the account of the battle with the Philistines. After David’s combat with Goliath in the Valley of Elah, the Philistines flee, ‘and the wounded of the Philistines fell down by the Way to Sha’arayim….'(1 Sam. 17:52).
The third dramatic find was that of an oval black seal in the dig opposite the Western Wall of the old City, conducted by Shlomit Wexler-Bedollah for the IAA. It shows a typical Assyrian archer, as on the Lachish reliefs in the British Museum, alongside a three-letter Hebrew name, X-G-V (the first letter is a Heth), and can be dated by the script to the 8th or 7th century BCE. The seal is so curious, combining a Hebrew name with an Assyrian motif, that it has already been pronounced a fake (a fashionable point of view) by one expert. but this is unlikely, as it was found in a controlled scientific excavation and is so unusual that a forger would neither know nor be tempted to make the connection. One possibility is that it belonged to an Israelite mercenary working for the Assyrian army that besieged Jerusalem in the time of Sennacherib and Hezekiah, but nothing is definite so far.
On the subject of fakes, the trial in Jerusalem District Court of Oded Golan and three accomplices, accused of faking the Yehoash Tablet and the Inscription on the James, brother of Jesus, Ossuary, has been halted for several months until January 2009. The trial has been going on for nearly three years, the court only meets once a week, and the judge has advised the police and the IAA to reconsider their case as they have so far been unable to pin down the charges on Golan and his co-defendants, in spite of the fact that most experts consider the two artifacts to have been faked, something which the defendants continue to deny. The judge’s opinion is a setback for the IAA but it is thought that they will continue to prosecute though they may consider new tactics when the case resumes next year. Watch this space.
Another dramatic find, reported from Southern Jordan by Thomas Levy of the University of California, was of a large copper-smelting plant in the area of the kingdom of Edom, dated by radio-carbon analysis to the 10th century BCE. The plant is a 10-hectare site called Khirbet en-Naxas (‘Ruins of Copper’) about 30 miles north of Petra, and contains over a hundred buildings and a fortress, and is littered with large black slag heaps, and the remains of burnt charcoal that have enabled radio-carbon dating to be made. Although people are quick to associate copper mines of this period with Solomon (1 Kings 7:47) it is more likely that it was the Egyptians, as at Timna, that worked the mines, as an Egyptian amulet of the goddess Mut and a scarab from Tanis in Egypt were found in situ.
Sad news of the death of the Franciscan priest Michele Piccirillo on 26 October at the age of 63. Piccirillo was Professor of Biblical History and Geography at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Jerusalem and an expert on the wonderful Byzantine mosaics of Jordan, on which he published at least four major volumes.
Albright Institute, Jerusalem