Shephelah Archives - Page 60 of 64

Kh. Qeiyafa and the Southern Adventist University

Southern Adventist University’s Institute of Archaeology joined the excavation team at Khirbet Qeiyafa this summer. Their recent DigSight newsletter includes photographs and a description of their experiences and future plans. You can read the newsletter online here. I’ll just make a few observations, primarily because there has been almost no other news from the Qeiyafa excavations this year. That may be related to an inability to decipher the ostracon, could suggest there is some great discovery yet to be reported, or more likely is the result of a rather regular season, without any dramatic news like last year. Archaeology is, after all, 99% physical labor, data collection, and laboratory analysis. The best “finds” come out of the synthesis of the data, when a site’s history and culture is accurately understood. In brief, some things I noted in the newsletter:

Dr. Michael G. Hasel, director of SAU’s Institute of Archaeology is associate director of the KQ excavation.
The team is planning to work at KQ until 2012 when they will begin their own excavations under the umbrella of the Elah Valley Regional Project.
The gate that Yosef Garfinkel visually identified last fall was excavated and it is apparently still identified as a gate. (This is significant because it is a second gate at the site.)
The Hellenistic settlement is immediately preceded by Iron IIa floors upon which were “almost complete restorable vessels, including a lamp, chalice, and large storage jars with thumbprint impressions.”
The casemate wall rests on bedrock, “indicating without a doubt that the massive wall system associated with the western gate does in fact date to the early tenth century B.C., despite recent opposing suggestions by some scholars.”
Garfinkel’s lecture at the Institute on November 17 is entitled, “Excavating the Biblical City of Sha’arayim.” He apparently has not changed his identification of the site since last year.
Garfinkel’s ASOR lecture (11/19) is a double session, entitled “Khirbet Qeiyafa: A Fortified City in Judah from the Time of King David.” See a full list of related lectures at Luke Chandler’s blog.

The newsletter has more, including opportunities for the general public and a way to subscribe to the newsletter.

Tagged Excavations, Shephelah

“Bible Valley” Park

Yediot Ahronot has an article which was summarized in the Caspari Center Media Review about a subject that I have not read about elsewhere. Nor have I heard of a “Judaean valley,” but from the context I believe this refers to what geographers sometimes call the “Chalk Moat” on the eastern side of the Shephelah, near biblical Adullam.

In an article entitled "Bible Now," Eldar Beck looked at the background to the opening of a new "Bible valley" in the Judaean valley. The person responsible for the idea, Amos Rolnick, grew up on a Shomer HaTza’ir kibbutz which cancelled its Purim festivities due to Stalin’s death…. Rolnick, a kibbutznik who broke away to become a ‘capitalist,’ understood that Israel possessed the greatest financial potential in the world: lovers of the Bible. ‘I understood the power of the Bible in the world,’ he acknowledges. This understanding led him to conceive one of the most daring of tourist ventures now being planned in Israel: the creation of a ‘Bible valley’ park – a reconstruction of the biblical experience in a journey for Jewish history buffs, to be spread out over 100 dunams [25 acres] of land located in one of the central foci of the biblical story, in the Addulam strip in the Judaean valley, south of Jerusalem, not far from Beit Shemesh. ‘The Bible valley’ is defined as an interfaith project – Jewish and Christian – so that it will be possible to use it to link the hundreds of millions of those who also believe in the New Testament to the Land. It will be comprised of features devoted to the different biblical periods: it will contain a ‘Forest of legends,’ a ‘Forest of the land of milk and honey,’ a ‘Forest of the prophets,’ a ‘Forest of kings,’ and, of course, a ‘Forest of the Song of Songs.’ Via various technologies, visitors will be able to pass from our own time to the days of the Bible and to experience the course of history and faith … The heart of the park is intended to be the ‘Bible house,’ which will serve as permanent accommodation for the children’s paintings … as well as help in raising the funds for the next monumental project: ‘The people of the world write the Bible,’ in which framework the books of the Bible will be written by hand by people across the world, in their native language. The intention, explains Rolnick, is to get to at least 100 books, in 100 languages." The first books have already been written – in Taiwanese, Tamil, Finnish, Mandarin, Bengali – and are currently on exhibit at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem…. The project, supported by various individuals including academics and literary figures, is due to be built within the next five years, the Bible house being first on the list.

More information about the project is given in the article.

Tagged New Exhibits, Shephelah, Tourism

Khirbet Qeiyafa Photos from 2009 Season

Ferrell Jenkins has posted a few photos from the current excavation of Khirbet Qeiyafa. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because I wrote a number of posts about this site last summer (start here), suggesting that it may have been the location of the Philistine encampment at Ephes-dammim. The excavator believes that the site is biblical Shaaraim. I am pretty confident that it is not Shaaraim and look forward to the time when I can articulate my reasons more carefully. In the meantime, you can see an impressive photo of a gatehouse as well as a glass bottle discovered at the site this season.

Tagged Shephelah

Weekend Roundup

The Israel Antiquities Authority has posted a 9-minute video tour of the City of David led by archaeologists Ronny Reich and Eli Shukrun. Sites visited include Warren’s Shaft, Hezekiah’s Tunnel, the Siloam Tunnel, the Pool of Siloam, and the recently discovered Herodian street.

The cover story of this month’s Smithsonian magazine is the tomb of Herod the Great at the Herodium. If you don’t have access to the beautifully illustrated print edition, you can read it online here.

A review of last year’s work at Khirbet Qeiyafa (aka “Elah Fortress, Shaarayaim) is the subject of a two-part radio interview at Arutz-7.

Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that the government must establish a national park along part of the eastern wall of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in order to protect important antiquities from the

expanding Muslim cemetery.
Five well-preserved Roman shipwrecks dating from the 1st century B.C. to the 4th century A.D. have been found off the western Italian coast.

The Biblical Archaeology Society has just produced a free 45-page e-book entitled, From Babylon to Baghdad: Ancient Iraq and the Modern West. The four articles are:

The Genesis of Genesis, by Victor Hurowitz
Backward Glance: Americans at Nippur, by Katharine Eugenia Jones
Europe Confronts Assyrian Art, by Mogens Trolle Larsen
Firsthand Report: Tracking Down the Looted Treasures of Iraq, by Matthew Bogdanos

Elad has asked the city of Jerusalem for permission to construct in the City of David “several apartment buildings, a 100-car-capacity parking lot, a synagogue, a kindergarten, roads and additional tourism infrastructure.”

HT: Joe Lauer and Explorator

Tagged Herod's Tomb, Italy, Jerusalem, Shephelah

Possible Finds of Hezekiah, Mistress of Lionesses, and more

An inscription with six paleo-Hebrew letters has been found in the City of David. The Israel Antiquities Authority strangely has a press release after the item has already been published in the Israel Exploration Journal (58:48-50) and Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April 2009). You can download a photo of the inscription here. The question of interest to Bible readers is whether the inscription preserves three letters of the name of Hezekiah. For analysis, I recommend Chris Heard’s blogpost and comments.

A press release from the American Friends of Tel Aviv University describes a Late Bronze Age plaque that may depict a female king, known in the Amarna Letters as the “mistress of the lionesses.” A copy of the article includes a high-res version of the plaque drawing.

The British Museum has plans to expand, but the Louvre had more visitors in 2008.

The Turkish Riviera Magazine covers the ancient city of Perge (Perga) in an article that includes some good photographs and diagrams. Paul visited the city on his first missionary journey (Acts 13:13-14; 14:25).

If you like to read the OT in Hebrew or the NT in Greek, but struggle with the vocabulary, you may have been attracted to one of the new “reader’s Bibles” that defines the less common vocabulary on the same page as the text. Now John Dyer has created a “make your own” version that looks like it could be quite useful. Even if you have a “reader’s Bible,” you could print off a chapter of the text instead of carrying multiple Bibles to church. (It’s a new site, and there may be bugs. Currently it’s not loading for me in Internet Explorer, but works in Firefox. To change the reading, select the chapter at the top and type over it.)

Hattips to Joe Lauer, Explorator, and Justin Taylor

Tagged Discoveries, Jerusalem, Shephelah

Aren Maeir on the 35th Annual Archaeological Conference

Today the 35th Annual Archaeological Conference was held in Jerusalem, and fortunately for us, Aren Maeir was there and has commented on some of the interesting presentations that were given.

You can read his blog for the full report, but here are the three of most interest to this blog author:

1) Haggai Misgav spoke about the Kh. Qeiyafa inscription, which still is for the most part undeciphered, but he showed some good slides of the 5 lines, 50 letters, and showed nicely the reading of, e.g., eved (slave), melek (king), al t’as (don’t do in biblical hebrew), etc. Inter alia, the so-called “Goliath inscription” from Tell es-Safi/Gath was mentioned….
4) Erez Ben-Yosef et al, who discussed some interesting results of Tom Levi’s project in the Edom lowlands, including details on some new sites at which there is evidence for early Iron Age and Iron IIA smelting activities.
5) Norma Franklin who discussed the so-called “Proto-Aeolic capitals” of the Iron Age, claiming, very logically, that none of them were actually capitals!”

Tagged Discoveries, Excavations, Shephelah