Analysis Archives - Page 23 of 29

Speculation on the Khirbet Qeiyafa Inscription

With regard to the Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription, there are those who know and those who don’t. Those who know have been sworn to secrecy, leaving only those of us who don’t know to speculate. I am happy to oblige and suggest below some reasons on why this inscription is significant, thereby possibly fueling more speculation by others also in the dark.

What is not speculation is the fact that the inscription is being studied by Haggai Misgav, a Northwest Semitic epigraphist (source). Given the location of its discovery, this is no surprise, but it clearly rules out the possibility that inscription was written in another language. Misgav Haggai says at present that his conclusions are “doubtful and temporary” and he does not know when he will be ready to publish (reported by Jim West). That suggests that the inscription is difficult. I offer some ideas that may explain archaeologist Aren Maier’s comment that this inscription “is going to be
VERY INTERESTING!!!!”

1. The inscription is long. This is a guess based upon a photograph of the potsherd and a friend’s report that the inscription is 4-5 lines long. Too many inscriptions are known only from a small portion preserved. The recent ostracon found at Gath with a name similar to Goliath received much attention, but it contained only two words.

2. The inscription is meaningful. This is in contrast to other early inscriptions, such as the Tel Zayit abecedary (10th c.) and the Izbet Sartah abecedary (11th c.). Certainly alphabetic inscriptions are meaningful, and scholars can write much about them. But the primary reason why they get so much attention is because there are few other contemporary inscriptions. Sometimes conclusions about the state of writing are made that may be without warrant. The combination of a brief or ambiguous text with a lack of contemporary material makes possible many wrong interpretations.

3. The inscription was discovered in a stratified context. This is in contrast to the Gezer Calendar,
which was found in the debris pile in 1908. The Tel Zayit abecedary was found in a wall, not in its original context. Archaeologists do not have a clear stratigraphical context for many important inscriptions.

4. The inscription is early. Khirbet Qeiyafa has occupation from the 10th century and then a gap until the Hellenistic period (2nd c.). The inscription certainly dates to the time of the settlement, which guarantees a 10th century date (assuming that the site itself has been correctly dated). There are very few 10th century inscriptions in Israel, and all have some problems. (The only 10th c. inscriptions from Israel that come to mind are the Gezer Calendar, Tel Zayit abecedary, and the Shishak inscription, but there are probably others.) The significance of an inscription increases exponentially each century that you go back in time. A seal impression in the city of David from the 6th century is less rare and thus less valuable than a letter or poem from the 10th century.

5. The inscription dates to a period now highly controversial in biblical archaeology. In the mid-1990s Israel Finkelstein proposed a “Low Chronology,” which essentially re-dated all material believed to be from the 10th century to the 9th century. The poor material culture from the 11th century was brought down to the 10th century. Historically, then, Israel and Judah were impoverished and weak, or, more likely, non-existent (according to Finkelstein) at the time when the Bible describes the great United Monarchy. Like so many theories in biblical archaeology, this one is highly dependent upon a large amount of “white space,” in which one’s own ideas can be inserted.

Almost certainly this new inscription will fill in some of the gaps, as well as spawn its own controversies.

More speculating remains to be done on the site identification of Khirbet Qeiyafa, but that will need to await a future post.

Tagged Analysis, Discoveries, Shephelah

Crediting Sources

The lead story yesterday at Arutz-7 is entitled “Supreme Moslem Council: Temple Mount is Jewish.”

It begins:

The widely-disseminated Arab Moslem position that the Temple Mount is not Jewish has been debunked – by the Supreme Moslem Council (Waqf) of Jerusalem, in a Temple Mount guide published in 1925.

It then includes a couple of scanned images from the 1925 guide. The story credits the guide to the Temple Institute.

The Jerusalem-based Temple Institute (http://www.templeinstitute.org) reports that it has acquired a copy of the official 1925 Supreme Moslem Council Guide Book to Al-Haram Al-Sharif (the Moslem name for the Temple Mount).

We are honored that our story was picked up by a major news organization. They didn’t give us credit, even though the basis of their story and the scans that they post came from here. Reader Sean Q purchased the booklet, scanned it, and we posted it. The Temple Institute took the story and pdf file and presented it as their discovery. This isn’t a copyright issue, but it is an ethical one. Perhaps they’ll do better next time.

Tagged Analysis

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

Just Another Byzantine Church

The “Earliest Church in Jordan” sounded like a bunch of nonsense to start with and now a couple of scholars have more data and believe the excavators have made some big mistakes.

Even stronger criticism has now emerged. Two University of Toronto scholars argue that the excavators have misread the inscription in the church; they claim, from both a rereading of the inscription and from the architecture, that the church is significantly younger than do the excavators. They also say that the cave below gives no indication of having been used in the first century.

Biblical Archaeology Review has the story, including a pdf file of the article: “The Oratory of St. George in Rihab: The Oldest Extant Christian Building or Just Another Byzantine Church?”

Tagged Analysis, Discoveries

Gabriel's Vision (Messiah Stone)

The New York Times publishes an article on old news, Drudge links to it, and suddenly we have a sensational story that will “shake our basic view of Christianity.” Hold on a minute.

You can read the story in the NY Times, a copy at the International Herald Tribune, Haaretz, World Net Daily, and elsewhere. You could also have read about it a year ago in Haaretz, or read the article in Biblical Archaeology Review Jan/Feb 2008 issue. Why is it suddenly “news” now?

You can see photos of it at Haaretz, a large photo here, line drawing and transcription here (pdf), and an English translation here. You can also read the original journal article published in Cathedra here (in Hebrew; pdf).

Here’s a brief summary:

What: Three-foot tall stone inscribed in ink with 87 lines of Hebrew text describing a vision given by the angel Gabriel

When: The stone was written in the 1st century B.C. and it was discovered 8-10 years ago and sold by a Jordanian antiquities dealer to an Israeli-Swiss antiquities collector.

Where: It was found in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, possibly on the Jordanian side. Ada Yardeni: “You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.”

Forgery?: Even though this was not uncovered in a legal excavation, scholars believe the inscription to be authentic.

The Sensational Claim: The end of the inscription mentions a messiah who would rise in 3 days. Since the text was written before Jesus’ resurrection, it explains how the story of Jesus’ resurrection came to be.

The Sensational Quotation: “Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story” (Israel Knohl, professor of biblical studies at Hebrew University and proponent of this theory).

The Disputed Reading: “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

Why Disputed: “There is one problem. In crucial places of the text there is lack of text. I understand Knohl’s tendency to find there keys to the pre-Christian period, but in two to three crucial lines of text there are a lot of missing words” (Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language and emeritus professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at the Hebrew University).

Why This Matters:

Knohl said that it was less important whether Simon was the messiah of the stone than the fact that it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus. He notes that in the Gospels, Jesus makes numerous predictions of his suffering and New Testament scholars say such predictions must have been written in by later followers because there was no such idea present in his day.

In other words, if the disputed reading is correct, this reveals that Jesus and/or his disciples did not create the story of his resurrection after three days, but rather they borrowed it from existing ideas.

Of course, it is either one or the other: they invented it or stole it. Here’s a radical idea: Jesus was raised by God from the dead after he had been in the tomb three days. Jesus expected this, which is why he predicted it. His disciples remembered it, which is why they recorded it.

The author of this theory, Israel Knohl, says that this stone “should shake our basic view of Christianity.” Several assumptions are required for this stone to be so significant:

1) Knohl’s disputed reading must be correct;

2) Knohl’s interpretation of the text overall must be correct;

3) Jesus and/or his disciples must have known about this text (or a similar one not yet attested to);

4) Jesus did not rise from the dead;

5) Jesus’ disciples were dishonest in claiming that he did rise from the dead and in attributing this idea to him from another source;

6) Jesus’ disciples were stupid in dying for a lie that they invented. Altogether, I think that these assumptions are shaky enough to suggest that Knohl is a little too optimistic about the impact of his theory.

UPDATE (7/8): I found the BAR article mentioned above online and added a link. For today’s articles and analysis on the story, see this post at Paleojudaica.

UPDATE (7/9): I can hardly do better than Paleojudaica with the latest stories, so I will not even try.

Note his choice for “inflated headline of the week.”

Tagged Analysis, Discoveries

Earliest Church in Jordan

When a sensational but unsubstantiated archaeological discovery is reported, my inclination is to ignore it. Since the goal to gain headlines and popularity (and sometimes to stir up tourism), the best way to thwart the guilty is to not publicize their claim. As they know, all publicity is good publicity.

This doesn’t work very well when mainstream news sources carry the story and one gets multiple requests about the accuracy of the report. So I succumb.

The claim by Jordanian archaeologists that they have found the “earliest church” ever is the latest in an apparently on-going competition by archaeologists. According to everything I’ve read about it, there is no basis for this claim whatsoever. All evidence noted in the story runs counter to this claim.

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor says it well:

“Pushing the (date) back to the year 70 is very speculative. (The Jordanians) are desperate to create church sites (for tourism),” Father Murphy-O’Connor said. “I would be suspicious of this sort of hype.”

Be suspicious of archaeologists, pseudo-archaeologists, and government departments of tourism.

Tagged Analysis, Discoveries