Archaeology and the Bible 

What Mean These Stones

July 16, 2014

One of my favorite passages in the Old Testament is the story of Israel's crossing of the Jordan.  We are told that like pilgrims they plucked stones from that river that had to be crossed and set them up at a place called Gilgal.  And every year some child would ask a father, "What do these stones mean? "  and the father could tell once again the old, old story of what God had done for Israel.  Those stones were just rocks from a river bed, but three millenia later we are still stumbling across stones that have a story to tell and that is the subject of our study this Wednesday.
Every year there are archaeological excavations in Israel, and 2013 was no exception.  These excavations always add to our knowledge of the biblical world if not to our knowledge of the Bible itself, but they don't usually make the headlines.  Only rarely does all the sheer physical labor involved in an archaeological dig produce something of such significance that newspaper editors and TV anchors choose to include it in their daily selection of stories.  Since I am not an archaeologist, I can't give you first hand information about what was found this past year, but I can pass on what I've picked up from the journals.(1)   I've organized the finds based on the time periods on which they shed light.

Light On the Earliest Inhabitants of Palestine

Eshtaol
As often happens, major archaeological finds are not from planned excavations.  Highway 38 in Israel runs from Jerusalem to Beth Shemesh and passes through a little town called Eshtaol, some twelve miles west of Jerusalem.  As the road crew was preparing to widen the highway, the earthmoving equipment uncovered ruins and upon excavation these ruins turned out to be the remains of the oldest house ever found in Israel.  In fact, the house antedates Israel itself by several millenia!  Archaeologists date the house to about 8000 B.C. which would place it at least six thousand years before Abraham arrived.   It is thought to be one of the earliest houses ever built in this part of the world.
In a press statement, the archaeologists describe the significance of the 10,000-year-old domestic building, which dates to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period: “It should be emphasized that whoever built the house did something that was totally innovative because up until this period man migrated from place to place in search of food. Here we have evidence of man’s transition to permanent dwellings and that in fact is the beginning of the domestication of animals and plants; instead of searching out wild sheep, ancient man started raising them near the house.”

A Monumental Underwater Structure in the Sea of Galilee
A giant "monumental" stone structure discovered beneath the waters of the Sea of Galilee in Israel has archaeologists puzzled as to its purpose and even how long ago it was built. The mysterious structure is cone shaped, made of "unhewn basalt cobbles and boulders," and weighs an estimated 60,000 tons the researchers said. That makes it heavier than most modern-day warships. Rising nearly 32 feet (10 meters) high, it has a diameter of about 230 feet (70 meters). To put that in perspective, the outer stone circle of Stonehenge has a diameter just half that with its tallest stones not reaching that height.  The structure is just off the shore of the Sea of Galilee and just a short distance south of the city of Tiberias.  It appears to be a giant rock pile, possibly to mark a burial site. It was first discovered in the summer of 2003 during a sonar survey but is just now becoming widely known. The archaeologists are certain it was man-made, not natural, with boulders placed in a patterned arrangement. The assumption is that it was built on land. The land later flooded. The article notes that similar structures, from the 3000 B.C. were found nearby. In fact less than a mile away the remains of an ancient city of some 5000 inhabitants has been discovered and there may be a relationship between the city and the stone structure.  It’s hoped that an underwater archaeological investigation can be undertaken to find out more and collect items from the site.

Light on the Time of Joshua

The Sphinx
Many of us may not be familiar with a city by the name of Hazor, but  before the Israelites had made Palestine their home Hazor was one of the major cities in the region.  Those who have visited Israel in modern times are still awed by this massive mound rising beside a major highway that it once dominated.  The book of Joshua mentions that "Joshua turned back and captured Hazor and put its king to the sword. (Hazor had been the head of all these kingdoms.)" (Joshua 11:10).  Hazor was the site of an ancient fortified city in the Upper Galilee and was among the most important Canaanite towns.  It is still the largest ancient ruin in modern Israel and has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Before the Israelites got there, Hazor was ruled by Egypt.  The Egyptians call the city Hathor.(2)
The 2013 excavation season at Hazor produced an astounding confirmation of Hazor's past--both its Egyptian connections and its prominence in the region.  A sphinx, a mythical half-lion, half-man creature like the massive ones in Egypt except for size, was discovered at the entrance to the city palace in a 13th-century B.C. destruction layer. The excavators believe it is unlikely that the king of Egypt at the time, King Menkaure, sent the sphinx to Hazor, since there is no record of a relationship between Egypt and this section of the country during his reign. The statue may have been brought to Hazor as plunder by the Hyksos, a dynasty of kings from Canaan who actually ruled Lower (Northern) Egypt in the late 17th and early 16th centuries. Hazor was destroyed in the 13th century B.C. and the sphinx was already there at that time.

Light on the Time of David and Solomon

King David’s Palace at Khirbet Qeiyafa
During the past 30 years, the biblical narrative relating to the establishment of a kingdom in Biblical Judah has been much debated. Were David and Solomon historical rulers of an urbanized state-level society in the early 10th century BC, or was this level of social development reached only 300 years later? Recent excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, the first early Judean city to be dated using  C14 [the Carbon 14 method], clearly indicate a well planned fortified city in Judah as early as the late 11th-early 10th centuries BC. This new data has far reaching implication for archaeology, history and biblical studies.
Khirbet Qeiyafa is located about 20 miles southwest of Jerusalem, on the summit of a hill that borders the Elah Valley.  One of the world's most famous battles took place here, the battle between David and Goliath.  This is also a key strategic location in the biblical Kingdom of Judah, on the main road from Philistia and the Coastal Plain to Jerusalem and Hebron in the hill country. The city was constructed on bedrock surrounded by massive fortifications using large stones. The excavation exposed a long stretch of the city wall, two gates, a pillared building (small stable?) and 10 houses
Khirbet Qeiyafa's city wall is a casemate (double) wall with a belt of houses abutting the casemates, incorporating them as part of the construction.  The wall is more than 2200 feet long and 13 feet wide.  This indicates that this was a planned city. Such urban planning has not been found at any Canaanite or Philistine city, nor in the northern Kingdom of Israel, but is a typical feature of city planning in Judean cities like the famous Beersheba. Khirbet Qeiyafa is the earliest known example of this city plan and indicates that this pattern had already been developed by the time of King David.  "So what can Qeiyafa tell us about Israel in the time of King David? Some of the megalithic ashlars in this wall weigh almost 5 tons. Altogether, more than 200,000 tons of stone were needed to construct this wall. It would take a complex, highly organized society to build a wall like this."(3)
  "At the close of the seventh season of excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa [in 2013],  Hebrew University Professor Yosef Garfinkel and IAA archaeologist Saar Ganor announced the discovery of “the two largest buildings known to have existed in the tenth century B.C.E. in the Kingdom of Judah” with great fanfare. One of these buildings is a centrally located 100-foot-long palatial structure decorated with elegant imported vessels.  Garfinkel told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “there is no question that the ruler of the city sat here, and when King David came to visit the hills he slept here.” The other structure, a pillared storeroom, features hundreds of storage jars “stamped with an official seal as was customary in the Kingdom of Judah for centuries,” according to the IAA press release."(4)

The Jerusalem Inscription
Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has uncovered an inscribed jar fragment from her excavations near the Temple Mount. Dating to the tenth century B.C., the inscription is the earliest alphabetic text ever found in Jerusalem.  Since we  have extended accounts of the reigns of David and Solomon in our Bible it might seem that writing stories was commonplace then.  It may have been, but very few examples of writing have been preserved.  This one is the oldest ever found.  The inscribed fragment is part of the shoulder of a pithos, a large neckless ceramic jar, and it consists of just a few letters.  Written in an old Canaanite script that is earlier than Hebrew and reading from left to right (instead of right to left as Hebrew is written), the text consists of a series of letters—m, q, p, h, n, possibly l, and n.  Not only is the inscription incomplete, but its meaning is also a mystery since this combination of letters does not signify anything in known languages like Hebrew. Nevertheless, the excavators believe that this inscription identified the contents of the vessel or its owner’s name and that it might have been written by a non-Israelite living in Jerusalem during the reigns of David and Solomon.   How do they know it came from the time of David and Solomon?  The fragment—along with six other fragments of similar jars—was used as fill to support the second floor of a tenth-century B.C. building so the inscription had to be at least as old as the building built on top of it.  If the inscription can ever be deciphered, it may well shed light on business or taxation in ancient Israel, and it may well become more evidence of a Davidic kingship.

Light on the Time of the Early Church

Legio: Excavations at the Camp of the Roman Sixth Ferrata Legion in Israel (5)
During the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian (117–138 A.D.), two Roman legions were stationed in the province of Judea: Legio X Fretensis in Jerusalem and Legio VI Ferrata (the Sixth Ironclad Legion)  in the north.  Until recently, the exact location of the castra (“camp” in the sense of a permanent military base) of the Sixth Legion had not been confirmed, but textual evidence placed it in the Jezreel Valley along the road from Caesarea to Beth Shean in the vicinity of Megiddo.  The Sixth Legion was sent to the area sometime before the Bar-Kokhba rebellion (132–136 A.D.), and it remained stationed in Judea for another hundred years.
Based in the Jezreel Valley somewhere near Tel Megiddo, the Legio VI Ferrata was well situated to control imperial roads, with direct access to the Galilee and inland valleys of northern Palestine—important centers of the local, occasionally uproarious, Jewish population. An Arab village named el-Lajjun preserved the Latin nickname “Legio,” providing strong evidence for the location of the castra nearby. Consequently, the broad area south of Tel Megiddo has been known in modern archaeological circles as “Legio.”   The excavation of a Roman military headquarters with clear ties to major political and cultural events in the formative years of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity is exciting in itself, but Legio also provides an incredible new window into the Roman military occupation of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. No military headquarters of this type for this particular period had yet been excavated in the entire Eastern Roman Empire.
The discovery of the site of the Sixth Legion's headquarters takes on added meaning for Christians in the light of an earlier excavation.  A large structure with a mosaic floor, which served as a Christian prayer hall, was exposed in excavations conducted in 2003–2005 in the Megiddo prison near Tel Megiddo. "The structure is dated to the 3rdcentury A.D. The mosaic is decorated with geometric patterns, a medallion with fish and three inscriptions in Greek, one commemorating an officer in the Roman army who contributed toward the construction of the mosaic; a second honoring the memory of four women, and a third mentioning a woman who donated a table (altar) as a memorial to the God, Jesus Christ. The fish that adorn the floor of the mosaic became a symbol in Early Christianity—the word fish (ichthys in Greek) making a combination of letters which mean "Jesus Christ, son of God, savior". The combination of the three mosaic inscriptions from the 3rd century which connect a Roman army officer with Christianity in a prayer hall is an extraordinarily find, which predates the recognition of Christianity as an official religion of the Empire.  The finds at the Megiddo Christian Prayer Hall provide unique archaeological evidence for Christian presence in the Land of Israel prior to the reign of Constantine—a period which has so far been explored mainly according to literary sources."(6)   Obviously, the Roman Sixth Legion had enough Christians within it by the year 200 A.D. to make a special prayer room necessary.  This is not far removed from Peter's encounter with Cornelius who was probably a member of this Legion.

Philip, Hierapolis and the Gateway to Hell
The modern name of Hierapolis, Pamukkale, is Turkish for “Castle of Cotton,” a name inspired by the white stone cascades near the site that recall the flower of the cotton plant. Earthquakes have opened up huge holes and given rise to hot springs that have resulted in these “cotton flowers,” which actually comprise the world’s most lavish formation of this kind.
These geological phenomena have always defined the site. As early as the third century B.C. it was widely known as a thermal spa. The name of the city, Hierapolis, may have been connected with the place of the sanctuary of Apollo or perhaps with Hiera, wife of the son of Heracles. In any event, Hierapolis became a thriving Roman city dedicated to Apollo. His temple, the remains of which still survive, was the focus of the site. A prestigious oracle (similar to the one at Delphi) operated from Apollo’s temple. Ancient doctors treated the sick and the dying with the medicinal waters of the hot springs.
Pluto's Gate in ancient Hierapolis was considered a gateway to hell and sacred to the underworld deity Pluto. Italian archaeologists excavating the Phrygian city of Hierapolis in southwestern Turkey have uncovered the remains of Pluto’s Gate, a site considered an entrance into the underworld in the Greco-Roman period. The apostle Philip preached and died at Hierapolis according to the Acts of Philip.  This thriving Roman city became an important Christian center.
"Shrouded in misty poisonous vapors, Pluto’s Gate, or the Plutonium, was a cave entrance sacred to Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld. According to the first-century geographer Strabo, the site was home to rituals in which any animals entering the enclosure “meet with sudden death." Hierapolis archaeologist Francesco D’Andria reconstructed the route of the area’s thermal spring to discover Pluto’s Gate, which was destroyed by Christians in the sixth century. The Plutonium’s infamous mystique is not just the stuff of legend; during the excavation, several birds were killed by carbon dioxide emissions as they approached the Plutonium cave’s entrance."(7)
  Pluto's Gate is not the first discovery at D’Andria’s excavation at Hierapolis, located next to the often-visited hot springs and travertines at the World Heritage Site of Pamukkale. According to the apocryphal Acts of Philip, the apostle Philip preached and converted many Hierapolis residents, yet he was martyred there nonetheless. An octagonal church was built in Hierapolis to memorialize the saint, and a sixth-century bread stamp depicts Philip standing at the very site. These discoveries were followed by the excavation of a small church that D’Andria believes to be the tomb of St. Philip.

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 1 Much of the information presented below comes from the Bible History Daily website published by Biblical Archaeology Review.  The original article can be found at  this address: http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/news/top-10-archaeological-finds-in-2013/.
 2 Hathor was an Ancient Egyptian goddess who personified the principles of joy, feminine love, and motherhood. She was one of the most important and popular deities throughout the history of Ancient Egypt.  Apparently the Hebrew name sounded to Egyptians like the name of the goddess with which they were familiar.
 3 Hershel Shanks, "Newly Discovered:  A Fortified City From King David's Time," Biblical Archaeology Review  (Jan/Feb 2009).
  4Bible History Daily for July 18, 2013  quoted from http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/news/king-david%E2%80%99s-palace-at-khirbet-qeiyafa/
 5 This section is taken directly from  http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-sites-places/biblical-archaeology-sites/legio/.
 6 Taken from the web site:   https://sites.google.com/site/megiddoexpedition/additional-information/an-early-christian-prayer-hall
 7Noah Wiener, 'Hierapolis and the Gateway to Hell,"Bible and Archaeology News (4/1/2013) http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/news/hierapolis-and-the-gateway-to-hell/