Excavating the Tribe of Reuben
A four-room house provides a clue to where the oldest Israelite tribe settled.
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Footnotes
See “Frank Moore Cross—An Interview, Part I: Israelite Origins,” Bible Review, August 1992; and Allen Kerkeslager, “Mt. Sinai—In Arabia?” Bible Review, April 2000.
See Lawrence E. Stager, “The Song of Deborah—Why Some Tribes Answered the Call and Others Did Not,” BAR 15:01.
Endnotes
New official spellings of all sites in Jordan now correspond to the Arabic spellings of the written words, not the Arabic pronunciations of the spoken words; thus, the word for an ancient mound, tell, has become tall; it is, however, pronounced exactly the same as tell! ‘Umayri’s spelling was also changed from ‘Umeiri.
The Madaba Plains Project (MPP) excavates three sites—‘Umayri is sponsored by LaSierra University in consortium with Canadian University College and Walla Walla College and in association with Andrews University. MPP also includes excavations at Tall Hisban and Tall Jalul, both sponsored by Andrews University.
The roots of this plant were apparently an aphrodisiac. See Hector Avalos, “Ancient Medicine: In Case of Emergency, Contact Your Local Prophet,” Bible Review, June 1995, p. 30.
Frank Moore Cross, “Reuben, First-Born of Jacob,” Zeitschrift für die altestestamentliche Wissenschaft 100, Supplement (1988) pp. 25–37. This article was called to Herr’s attention by Larry Stager of Harvard University. Cross has published a revised version of this article, “Reuben, the Firstborn of Jacob: Sacral Traditions and Early Israelite History,” in From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., 1998), pp. 53–70. For a more technical report covering the same material as the present article, see Larry G. Herr, “Tall al-‘Umayri and the Reubenite Hypothesis,” Eretz Israel 26 (Cross Volume, 1999), pp. 64–77.
The evidence for the earthquake is very clear: collapsed slabs of bedrock and rapidly deposited fills in open fissures in the ground.
Tall Hisban was the first site excavated by the Madaba Plains Project and was directed by Siegfried Horn and Lawrence Geraty in the 1970s. It is now being excavated by Øystein LaBianca and Paul Ray. The excavation of Tall Jalul, another MPP site, is directed by Randall Younker and David Merling. The dig at Tall Jawa, begun by MPP under Randall Younker, was directed by Michèle Daviau after the first season until its recent completion. The excavations at Tall Madaba are directed by Timothy Harrison, who dug at ‘Umayri for several seasons.
For the upside-down V-shaped potter’s mark, see Adam Zertal, “An Early Iron Age Cultic Site on Mount Ebal: Excavation Season 1982–1987,” Tel Aviv 13–14 (1986–1987), fig. 19:11. For the crude seals with abstract designs, see B. Brandl, “Two Scarabs and a Trapezoidal Seal from Mount Ebal,” Tel Aviv 13–14 (1986–1987), fig. 1:2.