Arad—An Ancient Israelite Fortress with a Temple to Yahweh - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > BAR > March/April 1987

Arad—An Ancient Israelite Fortress with a Temple to Yahweh

By Miriam Aharoni, Ze’ev Herzog, Anson F. Rainey

The Israelite fortress at Arad is unique in the Land of Israel. It’s the only site excavated with modern archaeological methods that contains a continuous archaeological record from the period of the Judges (c. 1200 B.C.) to the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple (580 B.C.). This distinction promises to make Arad the type-site for pottery chronology, especially in southern Israel, against which pottery from other sites can be confidently tested and dated. Not only is the pottery sequence continuous, but the timelines between the various strata during which the Israelite fortress was built and rebuilt are for […]

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Footnotes

1.

We use the Biblical spelling of Negeb (rather than Negev). Negeb refers to the Valley of Beer-Sheba (also the Biblical spelling; see map) where ancient Arad is located. Today the name Negev is used to designate the entire southern part of Israel.

2.

An alternate date would be around 813 B.C. in the reign of Jehoash (Joash), when Judah was hard hit by Hazael, king of Damascus (2 Kings 12:17ff; 2 Chronicles 24:23–26). Judah’s southern enemies might have taken advantage of this situation, perhaps in consort with Hazael. But it is strange that the Bible is silent about any invasion of the south at this time. Miriam Aharoni dates the destruction of stratum X to the first quarter of the eighth century B.C.

3.

Stratum VIII at Arad was destroyed at the same time as stratum III at Lachish. The Lachish destruction was commemorated in the famous Assyrian reliefs in Sennacherib’s palace depicting the siege and conquest of Lachish (see “Destruction of Judean Fortress Portrayed in Dramatic Eighth-Century B.C. Pictures,” BAR 10:02).

4.

As Ahab king of Israel had done over a century earlier.

5.

A wadi is a dry river bed or small river common in Israel and the surrounding regions. The American equivalent would be “arroyo.”

6.

For a similar inscription see André Lemaire, “Probable Head of Priestly Scepter from Solomon’s Temple Surfaces in Jerusalem,” BAR 10:01.

Endnotes

1.

In Shishak’s inscription, the Egyptian scribe defines the two Arads by the term hqrm, “fortress enclosures.” Two scholars, Martin Noth and Benjamin Mazar, long ago had seen that the Egyptian spelling represented the equivalent of later Aramaic hagra’. elsewhere in the inscription, a few other places in the Negeb area are defined as p´-hqr, “the fortress enclosure,” with the Egyptian definite article for masculine singular nouns. But the form with final –m, the typical plural suffix of Semitic languages, only appears with the two Arads. The fact that this is the only place where hqr is followed by two towns with identical names is proof that hqrm is meant for a plural. The scribe did not add the Egyptian definite article for the plural, which is n´, not p´, because of the Semitic inflection; he did not think that the article was necessary.

2.

James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 292.

3.

Frank Moore Cross, who also made reference to the supposed confusion in the stratigraphy at Arad, suggested that the second letter was not kaf but a Phoenician shin of the sixth century B.C. On one of the bowls, the central stroke is so long as to preclude any association with a Phoenician shin; therefore, we reject his paleographic argument out of hand. Furthermore, those bowls were buried beneath a fill of stratum IX which itself was sealed by floors of the later strata. The stratigraphy here is absolutely certain and in no way confused.