Excavating Hazor, Part Two: Did the Israelites Destroy the Canaanite City?

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A fierce conflagration marked the end of Canaanite Hazor. Across the site, a thick layer of ashes and charred wood—in places 3 feet deep—attests to the intensity of the blaze in the northern Galilee city. Within the walls of Hazor’s palace, the fire was especially fierce: The unusual amount of timber used in the construction of the building, and the large quantity of oil stored in huge pithoi (storage jars) throughout the palace, proved a fatal combination—creating an inferno with temperatures exceeding 2350° Fahrenheit. In this intense heat, the palace’s mudbrick walls vitrified, basalt slabs cracked, and clay vessels […]

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Footnotes

Orthostats are large, well-dressed stones that line the lower part of the walls of temples or public buildings. Orthostats carved in the shape of a lion are sometimes placed on either side of the entrance to such buildings, where they serve as guardians.

See Avraham Biran, “Sacred Spaces: Of Standing Stones, High Places and Cult Objects at Tel Dan,” BAR 24:05.

See Amnon Ben-Tor, “Big-Game Hunting: The Lion of Hazor,” BAR 24:01; and Bonnie Rochman, “The Pride of Hazor: Lion Statue Regains Its Long-Lost Mate,” BAR 23:06.

See “Ivory Treasure,” BAR 20:01

A cartouche is an oval containing the hieroglyphic name and titles of an Egyptian king.

Endnotes

Although today most scholars agree that the truth about the Israelite settlement probably lies somewhere between the Joshua and Judges accounts, in the 1950s and 1960s these conflicting accounts divided scholars—some of whom (led by Yigael Yadin and Abraham Malamat) accepted the conquest story found in Joshua, while others (led by Albrecht Alt and Yohanan Aharoni) leaned toward the model of peaceful infiltration found in Judges. For a summary of these and other approaches, see Adam Zertal, “Israel Enters Canaan—Following the Pottery Trail,” BAR 17:05; and “Israel’s Emergence in Canaan: BR Interviews Norman Gottwald,” Bible Review, October 1989; and Yigael Yadin, “Is the Biblical Account of the Israelite Conquest of Canaan Historically Reliable?” BAR 08:02.

Yadin, Hazor: The Rediscovery of a Great Citadel of the Bible (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 13.

Yadin, Hazor, The Schweich Lecture Series of the British Academy 1970 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), p. 108; and Hazor: The Rediscovery, pp. 249–255.

Yadin, Hazor: The Rediscovery, p. 16.

Yadin, Hazor: The Rediscovery, p. 18–19.

Yadin, Hazor III–IV (Text) (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society/Hebrew Univ., 1989), pp. 6–10; Hazor III–IV (Plates) (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society/Hebrew Univ., 1961), plates 5–7; and Hazor, p. 124.

Yadin, Hazor, p. 104; and Hazor: The Rediscovery, p. 262; Sir Leonard Woolley, Alalakh: An Account of the Excavations at Tell Atchana in the Hatay, 1937–49 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), p. 65.

Seymour Gitin, “Scoops: Corpus, Function and Typology,” in Michael Heltzer, Alan Segal and David Kaufman, eds., Studies in the Archaeology and History of Ancient Israel (Haifa: Haifa Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 99–126.

That not only stone but wood was often reused in later buildings is a phenomenon with which archaeologists are familiar: One famous example is the wooden beams of the Byzantine period that were used in the ceiling of buildings of the Islamic period in Jerusalem.

10.

See Frank Yurco, “3,200-Year-Old Picture of Israelites Found in Egypt,” BAR 16:05.

11.

Yadin, in Symposia: Celebrating the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Schools of Oriental Research (1900–1975), ed. Frank Moore Cross (Cambridge, MA: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1979), p. 66.