Todd Bolen, Author at BiblePlaces.com

City of David Excavation Report

Excavations began in the parking lot below Dung Gate in 2003 and were resumed in 2007. The Israel Antiquities Authority has just released a brief report on the discoveries from the 2007 season. It should be noted that this report does not include results from 2008.

Excavations of area in May 2008

The longest portion of the report concerns the Second Temple period, which is primarily the 1st century A.D. It reports one of the discoveries:

A large impressive edifice, whose northeastern corner has only been revealed to date, was in the southern unit. The eastern wall of the building (exposed length over 14 m, thickness c. 2 m, height more than 5 m) was built of large roughly dressed fieldstones, some of which were hundreds of kilograms in weight. The northern wall (width c. 1 m) was also preserved to a substantial height. The interior portion of the building, within the limits of the excavated area, indicated that the structure was divided into elongated halls, oriented northwest-southeast.

This is what was hailed in the media as the “palace of Queen Helene of Adiabene,” though as the 1st century ruler’s name is not mentioned in this report, some may have missed the connection.

The period of greater interest given the current discussion of the nature of Jerusalem in the Old Testament period is the section on the Iron Age, quoted here in full.

The remains of the period, exposed in five strata that represented most of the Iron Age, were founded directly on bedrock, marking the earliest settlement in this part of the City of David. This period was mainly characterized in this area by relatively densely built houses of careless and poor construction. The houses, built of one-stone-wide walls, contained a variety of domestic installations. These indicate a residential quarter that existed in the area during this period.
The early phase of the Iron Age was noted for the use of bedrock the builders had employed for setting the buildings’ walls and incorporating it within their built complex of structures. Thus, ‘habitation pockets’, confined between the buildings’ walls and bedrock outcrops, were discovered. This phase was dated earlier than the eighth century BCE, based on the abundance of ceramic finds. The later phase of this period dated to the seventh–sixth centuries BCE. No building remains from Iron I were discovered.

There are several significant points to note here:

The discovery of houses from the Iron Age in Jerusalem is unusual. In most places, later destruction removed traces of building except for monumental structure (walls, water systems). The best examples of houses were found on the other (that is, east) side of the City of David in Shiloh’s excavation.
Caution should be taken before concluding that because some houses in Jerusalem at this time were of “poor construction,” all were.
Some of the material is “earlier than the eighth century,” which means 9th century (or possibly 10th, but distinguishing pottery between the two centuries is problematic at the moment). This indicates that there was habitation in this area before the expansion in Hezekiah’s day (late 8th century) when the Western Hill was fortified. This should not be surprising, given indications in the biblical text.
That no remains were found from Iron I (or Bronze Age; see end of report) also fits the biblical narrative. The city of Jebus was small and more closely located to the Gihon Spring when it was captured by David. The city expanded to the north as David prepared for the construction of the temple.

In other words, the biblical account would lead us to expect to find remains earlier than the 10th century in the City of David, remains from the 10th century and later at the Temple Mount, with a likely “filling in” of habitation between the two sometime after the temple’s construction.

Admittedly, there are other possibilities, but this one seems quite reasonable, and it appears to fit with the results of this report.

Readers unfamiliar with the geography of the area and the location of these excavations will better understand the last two points with the graphic below, which shows that the excavation area was outside the boundaries of the “City of David.”

Jerusalem from the southwestClick on graphic for high-resolution

Tagged Analysis, Discoveries, Excavations, Jerusalem

Recommended: Touring in the Golan Heights

The Jerusalem Post has an article about tourism in the Golan Heights, including Mount Hermon, Druze villages, B&Bs in Ramot, wineries and Hammat Gader.

A budding tourist industry, which boasts a ski resort, boutique wineries and posh inns, has sprouted on the unlikely brush and volcanic rock terrain of the Golan Heights, where memories of bloody battles are still fresh.
The Mount Hermon Ski Resort, which peaks at about 2,225 meters above sea level, has some 50 days of good skiing a year, says General Manager Menahem Baruch. The resort draws about 280,000 visitors a year.

Mount Hermon ski resort

An intelligence-collecting radar station sits on the mountain’s summit, where, on a good day, a naked eye can see all the way to Damascus. The land is dotted with trenches, foxholes, and a now-empty army base captured by the Syrians in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and later retaken by Israeli troops, at the cost of the lives of more than 100 soldiers.

“The Hermon is not just a ski resort,” Baruch says.

“Since Yom Kippur [War], it has become the eyes of the nation and has taken on the significance and importance of a national site.”

In 1983, there were 6,800 Jews living on the Golan. In 2005, that number had almost tripled to 17,000, who live alongside 20,000 Druse and 2,000 Muslims, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics.

In the past three years, the government has invested NIS 26 million in improving the tourist infrastructure on the Golan. At the end of last year, there were 17 hotels in the Golan and nearby Upper Galilee, with 1,340 rooms available. More than 48,000 people stayed in the area in 2007, according to the Tourism Ministry.

Ramot Resort Hotel

I love the Golan and this article gives only a few of the reasons why.

The rest of the story is here.

Tagged Travels

Rabbis Want to Re-Ban Temple Mount Entrance

Haaretz:

Israel’s leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis are waging a new offensive against Jews visiting Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.
Rabbis Shalom Elyashiv, Chaim Kanievsky and Ovadia Yosef sent a letter recently to Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovich, the overseer of holy places in the Western Wall complex, urging him to reiterate the religious decree signed 40 years ago by most rabbis in Israel forbidding Jews from entering the Mount.
The rabbis’ efforts follow the publication in Haaretz last month of the visit of Rabbi Moshe Tendler, the son-in-law of prominent U.S. rabbi Moshe Epstein, to the Temple Mount.
Rabbi Tendler was photographed visiting the plaza atop the Mount, where the Dome of the Rock Islamic shrine now sits, igniting a firestorm of controversy in the ultra-Orthodox community. Several other prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis have ascended the Mount in recent years, including Rabbi Dov Kook of Tiberias, the husband of Elyashiv’s granddaughter.
The rabbis’ statement calls for a complete ban on entering any part of the Temple Mount complex for fear of compromising the “purity” of the area.
The declaration stated that “as time passed, we have lost knowledge of the precise location of the Temple, and anyone entering the Temple Mount is liable to unwittingly enter the area of the Temple and the Holy of Holies,” referring to the inner sanctuary of the Temple tabernacle.

The story continues here.

HT: Joe Lauer

Tagged Jerusalem, Temple Mount

Pyramid Pests Prohibited

If you’ve ever been harassed, cheated, bullied, pestered, deceived, or nagged and declared that even one of the wonders of the world was not worth the incessant and undesired attention of the locals, you may now have cause to consider a return visit to the Pyramids of Giza.

The monuments may be glorious, but visiting Egypt’s famed Giza Pyramids has long been a nightmare, with hawkers peddling camel rides and pharaonic trinkets hustling tourists relentlessly at every turn.
But now the hustlers are gone, as Egypt unveiled on Monday the first stage of an elaborate project to modernize the site and make it more tourist-friendly, complete with security cameras and a 12-mile fence with infrared sensors surrounding the site.
“It was a zoo,” Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archaeologist, said of the usual free-for-all at the pyramids. “Now we are protecting both the tourists and the ancient monuments.”
The three Giza Pyramids have long been unusually open for a 5,000-year-old Wonder of the World, especially compared to other world-renowned sites like Greece’s Acropolis, Jerusalem’s Western Wall or Rome’s Colosseum, where security is tight and the movement of visitors is controlled.

The ABC News story continues here.

Pyramids of Giza

Tagged Egypt

Conflict Over Upper Room Construction

The Jerusalem Post reports on the legal dispute over the building next to the Upper Room.

An ancient monastery adjacent to where, according to Christian tradition, Jesus ate the Last Supper, has turned into a legal battleground for Catholics and Jews. Last week the High Court of Justice issued a temporary restraining order halting construction work by a Jewish organization in a Franciscan monastery on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion adjacent to the Cenaculum, the Latin term for the room where the Last Supper was held. The court also issued an order preventing the Jewish organization – the Institute for the Study of the Family and Family Laws in Israel – from moving people in to live in the monastery, known as the Franciscan house, just outside the Dormition Church. David Bartholdy, spokesman for Tancredi, a Catholic organization that petitioned the High Court, said the construction infringed on Christians’ freedom of worship. “This is a holy place for Christians of all denominations,” Bartholdy said in a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. “Work being done there is causing serious damage to a monastery with important historical and religious value. Construction workers have already uprooted ancient floor tiling, scraped off a layer of plaster from the walls, broken down antique, chiseled doors, and all this under the supervision of the Antiquities Authority. “The construction work going on at the site raises the suspicion that someone is trying to Judaize a Catholic site and prevent freedom of religious expression.”

The story continues here.

Tagged Jerusalem

Shephelah Updates

The Shephelah, or western foothills of Judah, is an ideal site for excavations because of

1) its rich history;

2) its close proximity to universities in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; and

3) its moderate climate. There’s enough work to be done in the Shephelah alone to occupy every archaeologist working in Israel for the next 100 years.

Tel Aviv University has been approved to renew excavations at Azekah. Though it is one of the most important sites in the Shephelah, it has only been excavated by Robert Alexander Stuart Macalister in a brief dig more than 100 years ago. Among other things, Azekah is mentioned in the Bible as near the place of the Philistine encampment when David defeated Goliath. It was one of the last two cities holding out against Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. (see Jeremiah 34:6-7 and Lachish Letter #4). There are undoubtedly a lot of goodies buried under that pile of dirt.

Azekah from the northeast

Bar Ilan University has been excavating Tel ‘Eton/Tell Aitun under the direction of Avi Faust. This year was their third season of excavation and they are finding a destruction level as well as a fortress in the style of a four-room house, only larger. The destruction level seems to pre-date Sennacherib’s 701 campaign because pottery is transition form between Lachish III and IV; but also not likely to be Sargon II’s 712/711 campaign since it appears he only visited cities on the coastal plain. Scholars have suggested that the site is biblical Eglon (for more on that, see The Sacred Bridge, 128). The website is viewable in MS Internet Explorer, but not Firefox.

Tel ‘Eton, possibly biblical Eglon, from south

Khirbet Qeiyafa, located directly east of Azekah, is being excavated by Yosi Garfinkel of Hebrew University. They found a four-chambered gate dating to the 10th century B.C. with a casemate wall and two attached buildings. There was no previous occupation and the nearest subsequent occupation is Hellenistic, so it is virtually a single-period site for Iron IIA. They also found an ostracon (inscribed potsherd) with about 4-5 lines of writing, the contents of which are apparently more sensitive than Israel’s plans to bomb Iran. (This is a good reminder to thank those archaeologists who are quick to share their discoveries with all of their supporters.) The ostracon will be published by Misgav.

Tagged Discoveries, Excavations, Shephelah