“Digging Up Jerusalem”—A Critique

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Popular accounts of archaeological excavations serve a double purpose: For the non-professional, they provide readable and comprehensive summaries; for the scholar, they serve as a temporary substitute for the excavator’s final report which, unfortunately, is often long delayed. Thus, for example, both layman and scholar can be grateful for Kathleen Kenyon’s Digging Up Jericho, published in 1957, which provides a kind of interim report on her important work on the Tell of Jericho in the years 1952–1958. The final and complete report on this excavation has not yet been published.

Miss Kenyon’s new book on Jerusalem entitled Digging Up Jerusalem^a is a kind of companion to Digging Up Jericho and serves the same purposes with respect to her notable excavations in Jerusalem between 1961 and 1967. (Miss Kenyon tells us that the final report on Jerusalem will have to await completion of the Jericho publication. British archaeology, she laments, is not able to finance what she refers to as “stooges (or one could upgrade them to Research Assistants)” to assist her in the writing of her final reports.)

However, Digging Up Jerusalem is, in a sense, a novelty. This is the first time to my knowledge that an excavator has published two popular books on the same site. In 1967, Miss Kenyon published Jerusalem, Excavating 3000 Years of History^b which was also a popular and preliminary account of her Jerusalem excavations. Her earlier book on Jerusalem is nowhere mentioned in her new book, not on the blurb or in the introduction, though other books by the same author are enumerated. I do not know the reason for this omission.

018During the seven years since her first Jerusalem book was published, Jerusalem has been excavated intensively and extensively; and the excavators have been rewarded by a wealth of new information, some of it well-nigh sensational. But this has had hardly any effect on the author’s views. Even if some of the recent work is mentioned and discussed (usually very briefly), it is dealt with as though it has almost no bearing on theories expressed previously.

Miss Kenyon’s first Jerusalem book was reviewed favorably, with good reason, by a number of competent reviewers. If my remarks on her new book seem overly critical, this is only because I do not repeat the well-deserved praise given by my predecessors for the accomplishments recorded in her earlier Jerusalem book.

The various chapters of her new book are of uneven quality. Some are interesting and important; for they describe one of the largest and most meticulous excavations ever conducted in the Middle East (seven seasons; over 500 laborers in the peak seasons and an excellent team of assistants). Especially significant is her work in unearthing and correctly identifying the eastern line of fortifications of the City of David, the oldest inhabited part of Jerusalem. Other chapters deal with the history of Jerusalem research and excavation, elementary historical background, and a number of superfluous trivia (how her Arab laborers were paid; how to handle the lazy and the liars).

Miss Kenyon’s reputation is based not only on her excavations at three of the most important sites in the Holy Land (Samaria, Jericho, and Jerusalem) but also on the fact that she is the founder (or co-founder) and leading proponent of a method of excavation known as the Wheeler-Kenyon method. The Wheeler-Kenyon method, used throughout the Middle East, is undoubtedly an everlasting contribution to the improvement of archaeological techniques. However, it also has some limitations, at least one of which may be illustrated by examples from her new book. In these examples, Miss Kenyon and her colleagues erred in interpreting the evidence, as shown by later Israeli excavations, because of what might be characterized as a methodological fallacy.

The first example comes from several squares excavated near the southwest corner of the Temple Mount (Site J) under the supervision of the late Pere Roland de Vaux. Miss Kenyon tells us that “His conclusion [with which she agrees] was that he had located two Byzantine buildings.… which he suggested were part of two hospices built by Justinian (emperor A.D. 527–65) for the foreign pilgrims and for the indigent sick” (pp.276–277). This same area was subsequently excavated on a much larger scale by Professor Benjamin Mazar and his team. During the course of these subsequent excavations, it became clear that these buildings from Site J were not Byzantine. In fact they dated from the Early Arab (Omayyad) Period and were part of a palace complex, consisting of six buildings (the largest of which was almost two acres in size). The Omayyad Caliphs built this palatial area for themselves at almost the same time they built the Dome of the Rock and the El Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount. The evidence provided from these recent excavations is abundant and leaves few doubts as to the time of construction, the life span or the nature of these 019buildings^c.

Evidently the report on these later excavations, although published in 1971, was unavailable to Miss Kenyon when she wrote, for she does not mention them.

A second case involves her excavations in the Armenian Garden (Site L), where Miss Kenyon found walls preserved to a height up to 13 feet. However, the date and function of these walls was unclear to her. Subsequent excavations in the Armenian Garden by Dan Bahat and the reviewer, and in the Citadel by Ruth Amiran and Avi Eitan solved the riddle: From the Citadel in the northwestern part of the Old City to the southern end of the Armenian Garden in the southwestern part of the Old City, Herod the Great had built a gigantic platform almost 1100 feet long on which to build his palace. The walls found in Kenyon’s Site L and in the subsequent Israeli excavations were all part of the same network of retaining walls constructed by Herod to stabilize the huge quantity of earth filling required for the platform. The platform itself was required to create a flat area on which to build the palace, just as the Temple Mount was required to create a flat area on which to build the Temple. Some of these walls found on the western side of the Old City probably also served as foundations for Herod’s palace. (See Israeli Exploration Journal, Vol. 22, 1972, pp. 171–172).

Miss Kenyon states that “One of the reasons for our excavations in Site L in the Armenian Quarter was the hope that we should find part of Herod’s palace, but this was not fulfilled” (p.51). Later, she tells us that “We had hoped to find some part of the ruins of this magnificent complex in our excavations in Site L, but nothing survived there of this period, and it is probable that the palace was further to the north.” Then, taking note of the recent Israeli excavations in the Citadel, she reports that the excavators found “a grid system of walls [which] has been suggested as forming a podium of 3 to 4 metres high to support buildings belonging to the palace [of Herod]” (p.225). Although Miss Kenyon appears to accept the interpretation of the walls in the Citadel as supporting the platform of Herod’s palace, she does not take the next logical step and identify the walls found by her excavators in the Armenian Garden as part of the same Herodian platform. It is difficult to understand why she pushes Herod’s palace northward, thereby confining it to an improbably small area.

Miss Kenyon’s failure to identify and correctly ascribe the Omayyad palaces in Site J and the Herodian platform in Site L is the result of a methodological fallacy. Although her excavation method is distinguished by careful, even painstaking, observation and meticulous recording, error sometimes occurs because the area investigated is not large enough. It is often misleading to draw final conclusions with regard to a whole area from a small part of it. In short, ‘pars pro toto’, leads to erroneous interpretations. Although a trial pit may sometimes be enough, other times it is not. The reasons why a limited area often fails to represent correctly the whole field is clear: The ancient remains are often preserved in a very fragmentary state; if the excavation is confined to a restricted number of squares over which are imposed a heavy screen of balks (that is, if the balks are not removed after careful study and recording), the picture may remain confusing or dim at best. If Miss Kenyon had excavated a larger area she would not have failed to notice the network of walls of the Herodian Palace in the Armenian Garden or the palatial nature and Early Arab date of the Omayyad buildings in Site J. It is significant that Miss Kenyon’s most important and clearest results, i.e., the clarification of the city walls on the eastern slope of the City of David, were the result of a large scale excavation, quite unlike her soundings and trial trenches elsewhere.

Reliance on small soundings and trial trenches are also to blame for two of Miss Kenyon’s most disputed and controversial views: The identification of Josephus’ Third Wall and the contention that the eastern slopes of Mount Zion were settled only in the time of Herod Agrippa (41–44 A.D.).

020Josephus tells us that at the time of the Roman attack on Jerusalem in 70 A.D., three walls protected Jerusalem on the vulnerable northern side of the city. The other three sides of the city needed only a single defense wall because they were also protected by what Josephus describes as “impassable valleys”. From the north, however, the approach was relatively level; and it was from this general direction that the Roman attack came.

The identification of the so-called Third Wall—counting from the innermost defense line—has long been a matter of acrimonious, if scholarly, dispute. There have been two chief contenders: The line of the present north wall of the Old City; and a line almost 600 feet to the north on which the remains of a massive wall have been found. Miss Kenyon argues that Josephus’ Third Wall is on the line of the present north wall of the Old City. The wall found 600 feet north of this line, she identifies as a wall of circumvallation facing south built by Titus during the siege of Jerusalem. According to Josephus, Titus built a wall of circumvallation to keep his troops busy during the siege, to prevent the Jews from foraging for food outside the city and to protect his troops from sudden sallies.

Explaining this outer wall has always been a major problem for those who do not accept it as the Third Wall. Only recently has Miss Kenyon firmly rejected other conjectural identifications and explanations of this outer wall and unequivocably adopted the “Titus wall of circumvallation” theory. However, to this writer, Professor Michael Avi-Yonah’s argument that the wall is in fact Josephus’ Third Wall, is both comprehensive and convincing (See M. Avi-Yonah, “The Third and Second Walls of Jerusalem”, Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 18, p. 98 (1968)). Miss Kenyon does not have much patience for those who accept this argument: Of those who reject the present line of the Old City north wall as the Third Wall and instead identify the eastern part of the north wall of the Old City as Josephus’ Second Wall, Miss Kenyon writes: “It requires a firm determination to ignore the evidence for anyone to refuse to believe that this is the ‘third wall’, although such determined people do still exist” (p.243).

In any event, Miss Kenyon’s identification of this outer wall as Titus’ wall of circumvallation depends on that wall’s facing south, toward the city, rather than North, away from it. Limited soundings along that wall conducted during her own excavations convinced Miss Kenyon that the wall indeed faced south. However, 1972 excavations by Sara Ben-Arieh and Ehud Netzer along this wall have disclosed towers on the northern face of the wall, clearly indicating that it was intended to face an attacker coming from the north. One of these towers extended outward 20 feet north of the wall. Therefore this wall could not possibly be a wall of circumvallation facing south. In addition, a house associated with the wall indicates that the wall was built prior to the Roman siege. Apparently, the publication of these recent results (in Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 24, p. 97 (1974)) came too late for Miss Kenyon to consider in Digging Up Jerusalem.

Finally, Miss Kenyon contends that settlement of the eastern slopes of Mount Zion did not occur until Herod Agrippa’s reign. To him, she also ascribes a substantial part of the wall that surrounds the southern part of the city. Miss Kenyon bases this theory on evidence from small trial pits in the badly eroded eastern slope of Mount Zion where she found no evidence of occupation earlier than Herod Agrippa’s period. The line she suggests for the walls protecting Mount Zion prior to Herod Agrippa is most improbable. Moreover to suggest that Herod Agrippa built the first wall ever constructed to protect the eastern slopes of Mount Zion requires ascription of an improbably large amount of construction to Herod Agrippa’s short reign. It is clear that Herod Agrippa built the Third Wall to protect the city on the north—wherever that Third Wall may be—and even this he could not complete. How much can we expect of Herod Agrippa whose Jerusalem reign lasted only 3 years? (From 41–44 A.D., not, as Miss Kenyon has it, from 40–44 A.D. Herod Agrippa was appointed by the Roman Emperor Claudius, who succeeded Caligula. Caligula was assassinated on January 24, 41 A.D.) It is hard to believe that during Herod Agrippa’s short reign he built both the southern wall and the northern wall of the city. Such an argument also requires Miss Kenyon to allot an improbably small 021area to the city of Herod the Great (though in her new book, Fig. 36, it is somewhat larger than in her earlier Jerusalem book, Fig. 14).

Digging Up Jerusalem also contains a number of other errors. The First Jewish Revolt against Rome occurred in 66 A.D., not 67 A.D. (p.6, but on p.45 correctly). The date of the Arab conquest of Jerusalem is 638 A.D., not 636 A.D. (p.46, but on pp.274–275 correctly). The city was conquered by the Turks in 1516, not 1517; and by the Ottoman Turks, not the Seljuks (p.280). The wife of Theodosius II, was Eudocia, not Eudoxia (p.28 and passim); Eudoxia was the name of Theodosius II’s mother and daughter. R. W. Hamilton, we are told, ascribed a gate which he found beneath the present Damascus gate to “Hadrian about A.D. 135” (p.34). In fact, Hamilton does not ascribe the gate to Hadrian; he is considerably more cautious: “Of this only can we be certain that it [the gate] falls between the foundation of Aelia Capitolina [Hadrian] and a probable repair of the curtain wall in, or before, the fourth century A.D.” (Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine, Vol. 10, p.26 (1944)). The wall found by Professor Nachman Avigad, a major breakthrough in the understanding of Iron Age Jerusalem is not, as Miss Kenyon says, 3 meters wide (p. 148), but more than double that—from 6.40 to 7.20 meters wide. On p.147, we are told: “Our excavations in the SW corner of the Old City, belonging to the Armenian Patriarchate also produced no evidence of buildings within the period of the Monarchy … This evidence … has recently been confirmed by Israeli excavations outside the walls, immediately to the south”. The reference, is undoubtedly to the work of the reviewer in the court of the Armenian House of Caiaphas, and is incorrect. Here we unearthed a seventh century B.C. house with a dozen complete vessels on its floor; similar material was found in situ in at least two other loci.

Last but not least, of Robinson’s Arch we are told, “Excavations initiated since 1961 suggest an alternative interpretation that the arch was [not a bridge but] part of an approach from the south” (p. 14). The date is wrong; it should read 1968, the year Professor Mazar started to work, not 1961, the year Miss Kenyon’s expedition was launched.

Popular accounts of archaeological excavations serve a double purpose: For the non-professional, they provide readable and comprehensive summaries; for the scholar, they serve as a temporary substitute for the excavator’s final report which, unfortunately, is often long delayed. Thus, for example, both layman and scholar can be grateful for Kathleen Kenyon’s Digging Up Jericho, published in 1957, which provides a kind of interim report on her important work on the Tell of Jericho in the years 1952–1958. The final and complete report on this excavation has not yet been published. Miss Kenyon’s new book on Jerusalem entitled Digging Up […]