Yadin also excavated at Megiddo. Following on the heels of Gottlieb Schumacher (1903–1905) and the University of Chicago (1925–1939), Yadin headed the third expedition to the site, which took place during a few brief seasons in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. He used the Megiddo excavation to train his graduate students, just as he had done earlier at Hazor. Moreover, he used the excavations as an opportunity to investigate his theories about the authenticity of the biblical tradition.
At Megiddo, Yadin uncovered the ruins of buildings and other constructions, including a city gate and a palace. He identified the palace on the basis of its architectural plan as a “bit hilani”—a Mesopotamian name for a specific type of palace more usually found in northern Syria at the time of Solomon. The nearby city gate, with six chambers, was attached to a casemate wall (consisting of parallel inner and outer defensive walls connected by internal constructions to create small rooms that function both as part of the wall and as storage or living spaces).
6. Yigael Yadin at Megiddo in January 1960. Sitting (at the top): David Ussishkin (student at that time; now co-director of the excavations); standing, from left: Yigael Yadin, Avi Eitan (later director of antiquities), Avivah Rosen (secretary of the archaeology department of the Hebrew University), Immanuel Dunayevsky (architect), and Ariel Bermann (student at that time).
Earlier, at Hazor, Yadin had located part of a casemate wall and a city gate very similar to those which he now found at Megiddo. He dated all of these structures to the time of Solomon in the tenth century BCE, in part because of one passage from the Bible—a passage from 1 Kings that describes the building activities of Solomon at the sites of Megiddo, Hazor, Gezer, and Jerusalem: “And this is the account of the forced labor which King Solomon levied to build the house of the LORD and his own house and the Millo and the wall of Jerusalem and Hazor and Megiddo and Gezer” (1 Kings 9:15).
Yadin decided to see if there was a similar city gate at Gezer, the final site mentioned in the biblical passage. Gezer had been excavated previously, from 1902 to 1905 and 1907 to 1909, by the Irish archaeologist Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister. Yadin therefore began excavating through Macalister’s records rather than through the actual dirt. And, he found what he was looking for—a city gate strikingly similar to those at Megiddo and Hazor. Macalister had found one half of it but had identified it as a Maccabean fortress or palace, dating it to the second century BCE and the revolt led by Judah “the Hammer” Maccabee. Yadin believed that Macalister had misidentified this structure and that rather than being a Maccabean fortress or palace, it was instead half of a city gate, complete with side chambers just like those at Megiddo and Hazor. However, the other half still remained to be uncovered.
At the time of Yadin’s researches, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem together with the Harvard Semitic Museum had already reopened the excavations at Gezer. Yadin contacted the American archaeological team excavating there and explained his theory to them. Sinking their picks and trowels into the dirt, they quickly found the other half of the gate, thereby confirming his hypothesis.
These initial American excavations at Gezer lasted for ten years. It was there that the system of having American college students serve as volunteers on the excavation in return for receiving college credit was first officially instituted on a large scale. This practice, which helps to bring in needed dollars to run the excavations, is now commonplace at every major excavation in Israel, as well as at many in Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Egypt. By the 1960s, additional money for excavations like Gezer began to stream in from private donors, philanthropic organizations, and eventually, grants from scientific and government foundations such as the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. All these continue to serve as prime funding sources, including at Gezer, which is now once again being excavated, this time by a joint American-Israeli team.
Yadin’s excavations at Hazor and Megiddo were successful in uncovering new material, but it was his excavations at Masada, the desert fortress besieged by the Romans in the aftermath of the First Jewish Revolt (66–70 CE), that brought him worldwide attention. The excavations lasted only from 1963 to 1965, but they involved an international team of archaeologists and used volunteers on a scale that had not previously been seen at any excavation in Israel. Although it is not technically a biblical site, except insofar as it was fortified by Herod the Great in 40 BCE, Masada looms large in the archaeology of the region, for it has been a symbol of Israeli nationalistic identity and debate since its excavation.
Masada rises some 1,300 feet above the surrounding arid landscape, near the southern end of the Dead Sea, thirty miles southeast of Jerusalem. The mountain fortress on its top gave shelter to Herod’s mother and fiancée while he was in Rome in 40 BCE seeking support for his rule over Palestine from Mark Antony and the Senate. Herod saw the site as a possible place of refuge for himself and his family, and he outfitted it with two palaces, a number of water cisterns, barracks for soldiers, and storehouses for supplies. He never actually used it as a fortress, and the site achieved its greatest renown just over a century later, in 70 CE, when Jewish rebels known as the Sicarii (Dagger-Men) took it over after the failure of the First Jewish Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman armies commanded by Titus.
From 70 to 73 CE, the Jewish rebels occupied Masada, conducting raids for food in the surrounding countryside. Finally the Romans decided to rid themselves of the pesky Jews once and for all. The resulting action is told in great detail by Flavius Josephus, the Jewish general turned Roman historian. According to Josephus, the Romans besieged the site, building several camps and a wall on the desert floor, completely encircling the mountain fortress, in order to prevent the occupants from obtaining food and supplies. The Romans then built a massive ramp up the side of the mountain and wheeled their war machines directly to the summit. They soon breached a hole in the defenses and prepared to enter the site. However, night was falling and the Romans postponed their attack until the next morning. During the long hours of that night, which took place during Passover of the year 73 CE, the Jewish defenders of Masada decided to take their own lives rather than be captured by the Roman troops. Some 960 Jewish defenders died by their own hand. When the Romans entered the next morning, they found only a few survivors who had hidden in an empty cistern and emerged to tell the tragic tale.
There are, though, some questions about the accuracy of Josephus’s narrative. Several mistakes made by Josephus in his recounting of the events have long been noted by historians of ancient Israel— for instance, he mentions only one palace on top of the site, as opposed to two, and gives the wrong heights for the walls protecting the summit of the mountain—and it is generally accepted that he was not physically present during the siege and capture of Masada. Most likely, Josephus wrote his account safely back in Rome, utilizing the day books and other primary sources provided by Flavius Silva, the Roman commander who captured the site.
Yadin decided to excavate Masada in large part to establish what really happened there nearly two thousand years ago. The physical difficulties created by the 1,300-foot-tall mountain made the excavation unique. Heavy equipment had to be lifted to the top of the mountain by helicopter; volunteers had to walk up the long and winding Snake Path every morning and come back down it every evening. But Yadin, and soon the world, declared the effort to be worth the investment. The team uncovered numerous structures, including two palaces, a tannery, storerooms, and cisterns, as well as artifacts of everyday life such as a man’s belt buckle, which allowed them to glimpse what life had been like for the occupants in the days and weeks before they died.
Perhaps most importantly for Yadin, the excavators found remnants of a conflict—piles of sling stones, arrowheads, and other weapons. They discovered several bodies, including one group of three bodies that Yadin interpreted as the remains of a husband, wife, and child. Other bodies were found in a cave on the side of the
cliff. The findings of the excavation transfixed the citizens of Israel and were noted far beyond the borders of the new state. Yadin created a national narrative, based on the belief that his excavations corroborated Josephus’s account. For several decades thereafter, new recruits were sworn in to the Israeli army in a ceremony conducted on top of Masada, declaring that “never again” would Masada fall.
But in recent years, Yadin’s interpretation of his excavation has been called into question, most prominently by Nachman Ben-Yehuda, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In two books and a number of articles, Ben-Yehuda and other experts, including physical anthropologist Joe Zias, have explored some of the problems in Yadin’s interpretation and have revealed possible inaccuracies and misinterpretations. Principal among these are the discovery that the “family group” uncovered by Yadin may not have been a family group at all but simply several unrelated individuals, and that the bodies found in the cave may be those of Roman soldiers rather than Jewish defenders. The debate and the controversy about Masada and the question of whether the suicide by the Jewish defenders ever took place still continue. The Israeli army has ceased to swear in its new recruits on top of Masada.
Chapter 5
Beyond the Six-Day War: new surveys and strategies
The period after the Six-Day War in 1967 saw a new phase in biblical archaeology, generated in large part by Israel’s capture of lands previously belonging to Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. A new generation of Israeli archaeologists began wide-ranging surveys, and a few excavations, in territories encompassing the biblical regions of Judaea and Samaria, which before the Six-Day War were beyond the borders of Israel and thus off limits to Israelis. A number of additional projects were begun by international archaeologists in Jordan at this same time, including at biblical sites such as Heshbon and Dibon, but the results were not nearly as revolutionary as those in Israel.
The new emphasis on surveys was part of a larger worldwide archaeological movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This movement, known as the “New Archaeology” or “Processualism,” was spearheaded by the American Lewis Binford and his students. It attempted to emphasize archaeology as more of a “hard” science, with a particular effort toward generating universal laws about the past. Surveys were seen as one of the ways to do this inexpensively and effectively.
In this type of archaeological survey, a team usually consisting of between five and fifteen members—far fewer than the numbers needed on an excavation—walk across the land with their eyes fixed on the ground, recording what they see. The recorded items may include pottery fragments, stone scatters, ancient walls and foundations, and other materials of potentially ancient origin. This technique may be applied to document every site in a given region, regardless of its time period. The results provide an insight into the complete history of the area being surveyed, with the numbers of sites from each period reflecting the fluctuations in population density.
The Holy Land, and especially Israel, was of course no stranger to archaeological surveys. In addition to the earlier, and more primitive, surveys conducted by Glueck, Lawrence, Kitchener, Conder, and Robinson, Yohanan Aharoni—Yadin’s archnemesis and the eventual founder of the rival Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University—had initiated a well-known survey in the Galilee during the 1950s. Now, a new round of surveys was begun after the Six-Day War, especially in the West Bank and the Sinai, conducted by the Israel Department of Antiquities. The best-known of these major surveys were the “Emergency Survey of Judaea, Samaria, and the Golan”, directed by Moshe Kochavi on behalf of the Israel Exploration Society, which began in 1968, and the “Emergency Survey of the Negev,” directed by Rudolph Cohen from 1978 to 1988. Eventually, working from the late 1960s through the 1980s, Israeli archaeologists such as Adam Zertal, Avi Ofer, and Israel Finkelstein found literally hundreds of sites from biblical periods, none of which had been previously identified. As a result, estimates of population based upon site number and size for periods such as the Iron Age—during the Divided Kingdom phase (ca. 930–586 BCE)—were changed and updated for both the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah.
It became clear, for instance, to judge from the large number of new sites discovered during the surveys, that there were far more people living in the Northern Kingdom of Israel at the time of the Neo-Assyrian invasions from 734 to 720 BCE than had been thought previously. It was also clear that the population of the Southern Kingdom of Judah increased dramatically in the final decades of the eighth century BCE, probably as a result of refugees pouring in from the Northern Kingdom as the Neo-Assyrians invaded. These findings were significant for biblical archaeologists intent on learning what life had been like in these areas during the first millennium BCE.
The Six-Day War resulted not only in the capture of vast lands in the West Bank and the Sinai, but in the capture and occupation of the Old City of Jerusalem by Israeli forces during the war. The subsequent demolition and construction projects in the city enabled Israeli archaeologists to make important discoveries as they excavated in areas that had previously been inaccessible to them. In particular, the new excavations indicated that there had been substantial new development and construction in the city of Jerusalem in the last few decades of the eighth century BCE. The population of the city seems to have jumped from one thousand to about fifteen thousand inhabitants during this period, and the entire region went from a sleepy backwater to an important part of the ancient Near East in a very short span of time, again probably as a result of refugees arriving from the Northern Kingdom between 734 and 720 BCE.
Working in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem as well as by the Temple Mount and in the City of David, archaeologists such as Nahman Avigad and Benjamin Mazar uncovered evidence of tremendous destruction in the city during the early sixth century BCE. They found ash and debris piled high, and blocks of stone that once supported buildings lying about torn and broken. In the debris, they found arrowheads of a type specifically used by the Neo-Babylonians in the sixth century BCE. These findings confirmed the brief accounts given in the Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 24–25; 2 Chron. 36; Jer. 39, 52; Ezek. 4), and the longer and more dramatic account written centuries after the event by Flavius Josephus (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 10.7.108–10.8.154), concerning the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonians in 586 BCE.
Intriguingly, the archaeologists found several ancient toilets whose contents they were able to examine under a microscope. The microscopic analysis revealed that the inhabitants had been eating so-called “backyard plants”—mustard, radishes, cabbage, parsley, coriander, and the like. Some had suffered from tapeworm and whipworm, intestinal parasites that are acquired as a result of unsanitary and unhygienic conditions and practices—such as using human manure as fertilizer, not having enough water for thorough rinsing, and not having enough fuel to cook meat thoroughly. Archaeologists studying the data suggested that the inhabitants were under some sort of environmental stress. The eighteen-month-long siege and subsequent destruction of the city by the Neo-Babylonians in 586 BCE, as reflected in the Hebrew Bible (Lam. 2:20, 4:4, 4:10; Ezek. 5:10–17), seems the obvious culprit.
The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem also yielded evidence of a destruction that took place nearly seven hundred years after the Neo-Babylonian invasion, during the Roman conquest of Jerusalem. Here Avigad uncovered the “Burnt House,” so-called because it was the remains of a house that had burned down during the First Jewish Revolt (66–70 CE), which contained the remains of a young woman—an arm and a hand only—along with a spear and various objects that identified the owners of the house.
Elsewhere in Israel, a new set of excavations was initiated in 1971 at Tell el-Hesi, the site that had been first excavated by Petrie nearly a century earlier. The new expedition was led by Larry Toombs, a professor at Wilfred Laurier University in Canada. Toombs had dug with Kenyon at Jericho in the 1950s and brought the Ken
yon-Wheeler method of excavation with him, first when he dug at biblical Shechem with G. Ernest Wright of Harvard University in the 1960s and then when he reinitiated the excavations at Hesi in the 1970s. He thus served as an integral link in the chain from Wheeler and Kenyon to present-day excavators in the Holy Land. However, he introduced a few new and notable concepts that are still used to this day on many American, Israeli, and Jordanian expeditions.
First among these is the idea of drawing a daily topographic plan of each area being excavated at the site, so that the daily progress can be followed and a record compiled as objects and architectural elements are discovered and then removed; the scale used ranges from 1:20 to 1:100, depending upon the size of the area being excavated. Second is the idea of individual loci, in which each distinctive feature discovered during the excavations is given a separate locus number, while basket numbers are used to further define either minute changes within loci or differentiation in elevation. These are all then recorded on individual locus sheets, which include a description of the locus, relevant measurements and elevations, and a graphic description of each of the baskets that make up the locus. The paperwork thus generated serves not only as a record during the excavation but as detailed documentation, which facilitates the final publications of the expedition and allows other archaeologists to later reconstruct, and sometimes to reinterpret, the findings that have been made. The original paper locus sheets invented by Toombs have now been replaced by computer databases and online entry, but the general idea still remains the same. Finally, Toombs believed that it is imperative to publish all of the data that an excavation team uncovers, so that others can use it as well.
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