Todd Bolen, Author at BiblePlaces.com

Wednesday Roundup

Leen Ritmeyer has just released a digital version of “Jerusalem in the time of Christ,” a CD with 85 images (cost with shipping is £18).

Some Muslims are upset that Israel would dare build an elevator in the Jewish Quarter to allow handicapped access to the Western Wall.

Start making plans now for excavating next year at Tel Burna in the Shephelah. If you prefer to avoid the heat, you might opt for the spring session.

G. M. Grena is recommending an old film that shows the step-by-step process of traditional pottery-making.

Jesus.org is a new website that provides all kinds of information about the Savior of the world. I was particularly impressed to see an entire section of the site featuring articles from the best teacher I’ve ever known. Doug Bookman has 40 articles in the “Harmony of the Gospels – Life of Jesus” section.

Tagged Excavations, Jerusalem, Resources, Shephelah

Does the Merneptah Stele Contradict Archaeology?

Many times I have told a classroom full of undergraduates, “I thank God every day for the Merneptah Stele.” They no doubt thought I was a strange duck, but this crazy claim didn’t help my reputation.

It’s not that I don’t like the other famous inscriptions that relate to biblical history. I remember one of my professors saying that there was no extrabiblical evidence for the “house of David” and then a few months later (in the summer of 1993), the Tel Dan Inscription was discovered. I appreciate the Black Obelisk which has a depiction of King Jehu bowing down and paying tribute to the Assyrian monarch. And I love to point out the Ketef Hinnom silver amulets in the Israel Museum as the earliest portions of Scripture ever found. But I don’t thank God every day for any of these.

The Merneptah Stele is a 10 feet- (3 m-) tall monumental inscription that records the victory hymn of Pharaoh Merneptah (1213-1203 BC). Most of the lengthy poem is about his campaign against Libyan tribes, but at the end he describes some victories in Canaan. One of the enemies he claims to have thoroughly obliterated is the people of Israel.

Merneptah’s boast has had the opposite effect: instead of destroying Israel, he has actually preserved the fact of their existence at that time. Everyone agrees that Israel existed sometime later, but without the Merneptah Stele, very few scholars would acknowledge that they existed at this time. In fact, it’s my opinion that even today, 114 years after the discovery of the Merneptah Stele, most scholars don’t properly account for this inscription in their reconstruction of the origin of the people of Israel.

That’s the point of my brief essay posted today at The Bible and Interpretation. I’d be gratified if you’d give it a read. Maybe I’m not as crazy to give thanks as my students thought.

Tagged Analysis, Egypt

Franz’s Reflections on Hazor 2010

Gordon Franz has posted a review of his experience excavating at Hazor this summer. He considers it “the most pleasant, productive, and interesting season” of his eight years on the team. Some excerpts:

One important discovery this season made the international press: two fragments of a Middle Bronze legal tablet written in Akkadian and contemporary with, and similar to, the famous Hammurabi’s law code.
Robert Cargill asked the question on his blog: “Where was this in 2006 when I was digging there? lol.” The answer is quite simple: “Right under your feet where you were sitting during tea break at 7 AM every morning!” This discovery by the eagle-eyed conservator at Hazor, Orna Cohen, was made on the surface and not in the actual stratified excavation.
[…]
Another important discovery that will probably not make the international press is an Iron Age basalt workshop that was found in Area M. It was the first time in the archaeology of the Middle East that such a discovery was made….In the weeks that followed, I sifted much of the material from the floor of this workshop, saving the basalt chips, pottery, and organic matter. I also found an iron chisel. The excavation’s basalt expert, Jenny, will have plenty of material to study and analyze in order to understand the process of making basalt objects. Basalt is one of the hardest stones, which makes it difficult to work. It will be interesting to see whether the lab results show that the iron chisel had been tempered and made into steel. If so, that would go a long way in explaining how basalt was worked. Moreover, geological tests can be done to determine the basalt’s source.
[…]
One of the projects carried out by Orna Cohen and the Druze workers this summer was the reconstruction of part of the casemate wall near the Solomonic Gate. The Druze see themselves as the descendents of the Phoenicians and Hiram’s, king of Tyre, stone masons. They reconstructed the walls using the same techniques as Solomon’s workers: stone upon stone, and without the use of cement.
[…]
By the end of the 2009 season, we had removed most of the eighth-century walls and strata. At the beginning of this season, we spent the first week finishing that job. The next level of occupation was the ninth-century. I thought it would take a season to excavate the remains from that period. We blew through it in a couple of weeks. Area M is outside the Solomonic city so there were no tenth-century domestic dwellings outside the city. Thus we began to penetrate down to the Late Bronze Age palace. By the end of the season, we were on top of the palace and some monumental stones were beginning to appear.
It is in Area M that Dr. Sharon Zuckerman has suggested that the administrative palace of Hazor was and the Canaanite archive of the Late Bronze level would be located (2006: 28-37). When the archive(s) are found at Hazor, it/they will be a major contribution to Biblical studies and go a long way to resolve some of the thorny issues in Biblical Archaeology.

Several blogs have inaccurately reported that the MB tablet was found in the excavations above the palace in Area M, but Franz states that it was found on the surface of the tell west of Area M.
Franz’s full report is here.

Hazor upper city from east

Tagged Excavations, Galilee

Fake Tombstones in the Mamilla Cemetery

Israelis contend that Muslims have attempted to expand the cemetery west of the Old City of Jerusalem by adding tombstones over empty plots. From the New York Times:

The latest skirmish in the war for every inch of this coveted city focused this week on the dead. Did Israeli government bulldozers, working in the middle of the night, destroy hundreds of historic Muslim graves? Or were the removed tombstones outrageous fakes placed on parkland in a ruse?
Each side in the dispute — a fiery branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel and the right-wing Jerusalem municipality — is accusing the other of shamelessness and indecency. The area in question is in West Jerusalem, a predominantly Jewish area next to a contested site where the Simon Wiesenthal Center is planning a branch devoted to tolerance and human dignity.
“This is a despicable and, frankly, sad publicity stunt,” Stephan Miller, a spokesman for the Jerusalem municipality, said of the tombstones, which he called fictitious. “It is a slap in the face of freedom of religion and the preservation of religious sites that we work day and night to ensure.”
For its part, an Islamic foundation that had been fixing up and installing the headstones said its work was entirely legal and it believed the late-night destruction of the tombs was part of a city effort to take over the cemetery for more mundane needs.

The full story is here.

HT: Joe Lauer

Tagged Jerusalem

2010 on Track for Tourism Record in Israel

From ICEJ News:

Israel’s Tourism Ministry announced on Monday that 1.9 million tourists visited the country between January and July, keeping 2010 on track to be a record year for incoming tourism and breaking the magic number of 3 million. The numbers are already a 34% improvement over last year, and also include data indicating tourists are highly satisfied with the quality of local tour guides, the historic sites they were taken to see, and services offered in restaurants, bus lines, gift shops and hotels. “The consistent growth in incoming tourism over recent months, alongside the increasing satisfaction tourists feel toward the service they receive in Israel, should not be taken for granted,” said Tourism Minister Stas Meseznikov. “This is the result of large investments in marketing, public relations, infrastructure development, encouraging investors and upgrading the training and service frameworks.

Tagged Tourism

Hellenistic Gold Coin Found at Kedesh

From the Israel Antiquities Authority (temp link):

An extremely rare 2200-year old gold coin was uncovered recently in the excavations of the University of Michigan and University of Minnesota at Tell Kedesh in Israel near its Lebanese border. The coin was minted in Alexandria by Ptolemy V in 191 BCE and bears the name of the wife of Ptolemy II, Arsinoë Philadephus (II).
According to Dr. Donald T. Ariel, head of the Coin Department of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “This is an amazing numismatic find. The coin is beautiful and in excellent preservation. It is the heaviest gold coin with the highest contemporary value of any coin ever found in an excavation in Israel. The coin weighs almost one ounce (27.71 grams), while most ancient gold coins weighed 4.5 grams. In Ariel’s words, “This extraordinary coin was apparently not in popular or commercial use, but had a symbolic function. The coin may have had a ceremonial function related to a festival in honor of Queen Arsinoë, who was deified in her lifetime. The denomination is called a mnaieion, meaning a one-mina coin, and is equivalent to 100 silver drachms, or a mina of silver.
The obverse (‘head’) of the coin depicts Arsinoë II Philadelphus. The reverse (‘tail’) depicts two overlapping cornucopias (horns-of-plenty) decorated with fillets. The meaning of the word Philadelphus is brotherly love. Arsinoë II, daughter of Ptolemy I Soter, was married at age 15 to one of Alexander the Great’s generals, Lysimachus, king of Thrace. After Lysimachus’ death she married her brother, Ptolemy II, who established a cult in her honor. This mnaieion from Tel Kedesh attests to the staying power of the cult, since the coin was minted a full 80 years after the queen’s death.
According to Ariel, “It is rare to find Ptolemaic coins in Israel dating after the country came under Seleucid rule in 200 BCE. The only other gold Ptolemaic coin from an excavation in Israel (from `Akko) dates from the period of Ptolemaic hegemony, in the third century BCE, and weighs less than two grams.”
The excavations at Tell Kedesh, conducted since 1997, has uncovered a large Persian/Hellenistic administrative building, complete with reception halls, dining facilities, store rooms and an archive. While the documents in the archive were not preserved, the excavations yielded 2043 bullae, from which the flourishing of the Hellenistic phase of the building can be dated to the first half of the second century BCE.

Gold Coin from Tell Kedesh; photo by Sue Webb (via IAA)

The full release and high-resolution photo are here. In earlier days, Kedesh was one of the three cities west of the Jordan River designated as a city of refuge (Josh 20:7). More information about the biblical site is here. I noted a story about these excavations last week.

Tagged Discoveries, Galilee