Cedars of Lebanon: Exploring the Roots - The BAS Library
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Cedars of Lebanon: Exploring the Roots

By Nili Liphschitz

Israel, then as now, was impoverished in natural resources. As the old joke has it, if only Moses had turned right instead of left, Israel would have had the oil. Israel is also poor in sources of timber necessary in ancient times for the construction of important buildings like palaces and temples. Perhaps the most important sources of timber for these purposes were the famous Cedars of Lebanon. The Hebrew word usually translated “cedar” is erez. It appears in the Bible more than 70 times. David used it in his palace—supplied by the Phoenician monarch Hiram of Tyre (2 […]

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Footnotes

1.

Cemal Pulak, “Shipwreck! Recovering a 3,000-Year-Old Cargo,” Archaeology Odyssey, 02:04.

2.

Shelley Wachsmann, “The Galilee Boat—2,000-Year-Old Hull Recovered Intact,” BAR 14:05.

Endnotes

1.

N. Jenkins, The Boat Beneath the Pyramid: King Cheops’ Royal Ship (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), p. 80.

2.

Peter Kuniholm, Aegean Dendrochronology Project Report, December 1999.

3.

J.A. Wilson, “Egyptian Historical Texts,” in J.B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 227–264.

4.

For further details, see Nili Liphshitz and Gedeon Biger, “Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) in Israel in Antiquity,” Israel Exploration Journal 41 (1991), pp. 167–175; Nili Liphschitz, Timber in Ancient Israel: Dendroarchaeology and Dendrochronology (Monograph Ser. No. 26, Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, Israel, 2007). Chapter 6: Import of Foreign Timber During Antiquity: Cedrus libani, pp. 116–118, 122–124; Nili Liphshitz, “The Use of Cedrus Libani (Cedar of Lebanon) as a Construction Timber for Ships as Evident from Timber Identification of Shipwrecks in the East Mediterranean” SKYLLIS 12 (2012), pp. 94–98.