Horsing Around in Toronto

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“Come to our session on Megiddo,” a grinning Israel Finkelstein, director of Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology and co-director of the renewed excavations at Megiddo, urged me as we chatted at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in Toronto last November. “Lord Allenby will be there.” A magical name indeed. The legendary Edmund Allenby commanded Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary forces in World War I. On December 11, 1917, the last Turkish troops having fled, then-General Allenby made his official entry into Jerusalem by famously dismounting his horse and, out of respect for Jerusalem, walking on foot through Jaffa Gate. The official proclamation of British victory was then read at the Citadel.

But Allenby won his most significant triumph far to the north. In history’s last great cavalry battle, Allenby defeated the Turks at the Megiddo Pass, using the same strategy Thutmose III used 3,500 years ago.^a Allenby’s victory at Megiddo effectively ended Turkish resistance. Although he is best known in connection with Jerusalem, when he was rewarded with a title, he chose to become Viscount Allenby of Megiddo. He died in 1936, so I wondered what necromancy Finkelstein had up his sleeve.

But Finkelstein was as good as his word. The archaeological session on Megiddo was chaired by none other than the third Viscount Allenby of Megiddo. He is the great-nephew of the first Viscount Allenby and a deputy speaker in the House of Lords (Britain’s upper house of parliament). He is also honorary president of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society. But it is as a horse aficionado that he most appropriately served as the session chairman, for the topic of debate was whether the supposed stables at Megiddo were really that—or storehouses or barracks or markets.

The Megiddo “stables” were first excavated in the early 1920s by an expedition from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. That expedition had no difficulty in interpreting these tripartite buildings as stables—each had a central aisle flanked on either side with stalls. Some of the pillars separating one stall from another had holes for a tethering rope. On the floor (blocking the entrance to the stalls) were stone troughs from which the horses in the stalls could eat.

Then these same tripartite buildings were found at other sites—seven of them—including Beer-Sheva, Hazor and Tell es Sa’idiyeh. It was generally agreed that the tripartite buildings at these sites were storehouses (some had corner entrances rather than entrances into the center aisle). Some scholars nevertheless felt these other tripartite buildings could be distinguished from the Megiddo tripartite buildings. So the debate went on.

And it continues to this day. In Toronto, Lord Allenby claimed they were stables. In a fascinating lecture on horses and their needs and behavior, a horse expert from Vanderbilt University, Deborah Cantrell, concurred. We learned about things like “cribbing” and “windsucking”: Horses tend to “crib” or nip at the side of their troughs, resulting in the injurious swallowing of air. Evidence of cribbing could be seen, Cantrell claimed, on the horse side of the stone troughs between the pillars of the Megiddo stables. These were not ordinary stables, however. The earlier excavators had found two complexes of these tripartite buildings and the current excavators have found a third. 052Cantrell argued that Megiddo was a huge horse breeding and training center catering to horse purchasers from Egypt and Assyria. She has convinced co-director Finkelstein that the complexes are indeed stables.

But Megiddo excavation co-director Baruch Halpern doesn’t buy it. The side aisles of the tripartite buildings are cobbled. These cobbled stalls (if that’s what they are) would require an extraordinary amount of bedding—renewed daily—to accommodate horses, he said. Most significantly, these stables failed the “urine test”: In an effort to settle the long-standing dispute about the nature of these buildings, the soil in the stalls was tested for the chemical remains of equine urine. The test has been used elsewhere to prove that certain ancient buildings were stables (at Bastan in Iran, for example, where bits for horses were also found in the structures; no such items were found in the Megiddo buildings, however). The ground at Bastan proved to be unusually high in phosphorus—an indication of urine. Not so at Megiddo.

A senior staff member at Megiddo, Norma Franklin, also rejects the stable theory. In her talk, 053she emphasized the huge courtyard in front of the tripartite buildings. For the stable—contenders this area was a parade ground. For Franklin, however, it was a fairground, where all kinds of products were offered for sale, including sheep and goats, as well as products kept in the storerooms.

If you want to know more about this dispute, read the May/June 1976 issue of BAR—yes, 1976; it isn’t a typo—where, in a series of articles, we outline the evidence, together with a contribution by the illustrious Biblical archaeologist (now deceased) Yigael Yadin. (Which is a plug for our new CD-ROM, the fully searchable archives of 27 years of BAR.) This gives you some idea of how long this debate has been going on. But there’s always some new evidence—though never decisive.

As I listened to the competing arguments (to me, the storehouse argument sounds most likely), I thought how often the interpretation of archaeological evidence is uncertain. Perhaps this is part of its fascination. The current excavators of Megiddo went back to the site in the hope of clarifying some highly contentious issues—the stratigraphy, the dating of the various strata, the absence of evidence from certain periods, and of course the strange complexes of tripartite buildings. But all the old disagreements have persisted, even 054among the senior staff of the expedition.^b They have tried to make a virtue of this—it reflects their independence of mind and their willingness to tolerate differences, they say. But in a way it seems odd that the best guide to the dispute about the stables is a series of BAR articles from more than a quarter century ago. I don’t mean to single out Megiddo. The same thing occurs at other sites. And it is certainly not anyone’s fault that there are conflicting interpretations. That’s simply the nature of the evidence. And the nature of archaeology.

Listening to lectures from morning to night, day after day, other mysteries were called to my attention. Take the cities of the Philistine Pentapolis—Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gaza, Gath and Ekron. They have been extensively excavated, but not a single undisputed inscription in the Philistine language 055or script has been found. Nobody doubts that the Philistines were literate and wrote. But what language, and with what alphabet? No one knows. Why haven’t any Philistine inscriptions been found? Perhaps just the luck of the draw.

And, although these important cities have been extensively excavated, not a single Philistine tomb has been found. Didn’t they die?

Or take the nearly 300 settlements in the Canaanite highlands where the emerging Israelites settled in Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C.). Raz Kletter, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, pointed out that despite the fact that nearly 300 settlements have been located, no burials have been found. Did these early Israelites fail to bury their dead?

On the other hand sometimes we have tombs but no cities. Thousands of Early Bronze Age IV (2200–2000 B.C.) tombs have been excavated in the Hebron hills, for example, but there are no settlements for miles around. Go figure.

One of the highlights—and lowlights—of the SBL meeting was the session on the newly surfaced ossuary, or bone box, inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” The session was held in the Grand Ballroom of the main conference hotel, and it drew nearly 1,200 people. Only André Lemaire, who wrote the headline-grabbing article in the November/December BAR,^c provided a paleographic analysis, explaining why the shape and form of the letters allowed the inscription on the ossuary to be judged authentic and dated to the last decades before the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. No one on the panel was prepared to challenge him on paleographic grounds. Several speakers, however, were dismissive of the inscription without considering the paleographic arguments. For example, Duke University professor Eric Meyers questioned the authenticity of the inscription solely on the grounds that it came from the antiquities market, rather than from a scientifically-directed excavation. Moreover, its find spot is unknown. Since I had been invited to be on the panel, I responded that we would all prefer if it had been excavated by archaeologists so that we could know the context in which it was found. But that is not our choice. We must either consider it as it comes to us or not at all. To me, the choice seems obvious. We would know more if it had been scientifically excavated, but we can still learn a great deal from it even though it came from the antiquities market. (Another plug: New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III and I have written a book on the ossuary that will be published in March; to order your copy, see ad on the inside front cover.)

Meyers even suggested that the ossuary’s current owner, Oded Golan of Tel Aviv, might have purchased it only recently and added the last two words 056(“brother of Jesus”) to the inscription. Golan was sitting in the audience and Meyers looked straight at him. During the question period, someone from the audience asked Golan to address the question of when he purchased the ossuary and whether the entire inscription was on it when he bought it.

He ascended the podium and affirmed that he had purchased the ossuary long ago without realizing its significance (only Lemaire would recognize its significance decades later), and that, yes, the entire inscription was on the ossuary when he purchased it.

For the first time, several archaeology-oriented sessions at the SBL meeting were jointly sponsored by SBL and the William F. Albright School of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. The archaeological component at the annual meeting used to be provided by ASOR (the American Schools of Oriental Research). For many years the two professional organizations held their annual meetings jointly. In 1997, the organizations split (surprise: in a dispute over money). ASOR then began holding its annual meeting in the same city as SBL, but a few days earlier. That practice continues.

Since the split, there has occasionally been talk of the two professional organizations getting back together again, but the separate ASOR meeting, although it began on wobbly feet, has gotten stronger and stronger. This year was the best ever, with more than 650 attendees. So the separation makes sense financially, but it left a hole in the SBL program. Many attendees at the SBL meeting who were not professional archaeologists depended on the annual meeting to keep them up-to-date on developments in Biblical archaeology. So the Albright, as the school in Jerusalem is called, agreed to an experiment in filling this gap at the SBL meeting.

ASOR, the Albright’s parent organization, suffers from a case of schizophrenia when it comes to Biblical archaeology. Many ASOR archaeologists have an abiding interest in Biblical archaeology, although their numbers are declining. On the other hand, some archaeologists in the organization would deny that such a discipline as Biblical archaeology even exists. Many of these archaeologists have their professional interests in other areas, especially those who work in Arab countries. One consequence of this divide within ASOR is that the organization has changed the name of its semi-popular magazine from Biblical Archaeologist to Near Eastern Archaeology. In addition to the Albright in Jerusalem, ASOR sponsors two loosely affiliated “schools”—ACOR (the American Center of Oriental Research) in Amman, Jordan, and CAARI (the Cyprus-American Archaeological Research Institute) in Nicosia, Cyprus. Understandably, their agendas involve little Biblical archaeology. Not so, however, the 057Albright in Jerusalem. So it made sense for the Albright to provide the SBL meeting with some of its archaeological component. (Full disclosure: I helped broker the shidduch, Yiddish for “match.”) This year was experimental. Since it was a success, it is likely to be expanded.

At one session, co-sponsored by the Albright, Diane Edelman of the University of Sheffield in England trenchantly asked, “How can we sort fact from fiction in the Biblical text?” We can use internal clues, she suggested, to uncover possible sources the Biblical authors used and the motivations underlying the text’s varying ideologies. This is not a fool-proof method by any means. Nevertheless, it is a leap that historians are forced to make. Perceptively applying these techniques, Edelman was able to declare Saul, Israel’s first king, whose short-lived and shadowy reign was succeeded by the usurper King David, “a historical person and not merely a fictional character.”

The author of the Biblical passages relating to Saul, Edelman showed, used a variety of sources, possibly 058written, which likely contained reliable historical material. These may have included poetic materials, family genealogies and administrative lists. The latter probably provide us with the extent of lands firmly controlled by Saul, the core of which was the land allotted to the tribes of Benjamin and Ephraim. Gibeon was probably Saul’s capital and it may have been the location of the precursor sanctuary to Jerusalem.

Edelman, well aware of the reputation of the University of Sheffield as home to some of the world’s leading “Biblical minimalists”—scholars who find little or no reliable history in the Bible, especially for the period of the United Monarchy and earlier—began her talk by remarking, “Stories about Sheffield as a bastion of minimalism are greatly exaggerated.”

Unlike SBL, ASOR ignored the ossuary inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” Since the ossuary comes from the antiquities market, it falls under a ban, or herem, at ASOR. A paper on an unprovenanced artifact, as it is referred to in scholarly lingo, may not be delivered at their meeting, nor may an article regarding such an artifact be published in the organization’s scholarly journal. (For more on this, see my First Person column.)

The ASOR program was nevertheless exciting and informative and has improved in quality year by year. And it was as wide-ranging as ever. David Stronach, of the University of California at Berkeley, reported on the rape of Afghanistan’s antiquities, which involves both the destruction of ancient sites and of priceless remains such as the colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan and the virtual emptying of the Kabul Museum. Stronach showed slides of huge bags of ancient coins being offered for sale in the Kabul bazaar. I asked him whether he would advise someone who saw an important artifact looted from the museum on sale in the bazaar to purchase it, thus 059rescuing it from the illegal traders. He talked about the problem, but did not answer my question. The issue of how to deal with looted objects that come onto the antiquities market is a divisive one. Stronach would like to have nothing to do with the hated antiquities market. Yet there are costs to this attitude, too.

Hanan Charaf, of the American University in Beirut, gave a report on renewed archaeological activity in Lebanon. Seven sites, including Tell Beirut, Tyre and Sidon, are currently being excavated. And the archaeological remains at Byblos are being restored. At Tyre and Sidon, Phoenician tophets (burial grounds of incinerated remains) have been found, with urns containing sacrificed infants. In some respects, these tophets are similar to the Phoenician tophet at Achiz in Israel (which, incidentally, was further excavated last season by Eilat Mazar of Hebrew University, in a dig sponsored by your Biblical Archaeology Society). Excavation in southern Lebanon is, unfortunately, out of the question because of buried land mines, Charaf said. Another disappointment: Lebanese custom prevents the showing of any excavation pictures, even at academic conferences, until the dig has been published in a scholarly venue. In this respect, Lebanon is where Israel was 25 years ago.^d

ASOR did not neglect the archaeology of the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, these sessions were the most popular of all. For example, the room at a session on Israelite identity in Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C., the period of the Judges in Biblical terms) proved too small to accommodate all the people wishing to attend. The doors were opened so that people standing in the hall, bending an ear, could listen. In this session, William Dever, always one of the stars, discussed the difficult question of Israelite ethnicity: Can we define Israelites at this early period? Indeed, were Israelites an ethnic group at this time? Dever’s answer was “yes,” although he adopted the term “proto-Israelites,” as he said, “to err on the side of caution.”

Dever first examined the notion of ethnicity in the general anthropological literature. For example, an ethnic group perpetuates its sense of separate identity by developing rules for maintaining ethnic boundaries; it is also biologically self-perpetuating. These factors, however, are more easily observable in modern, rather than ancient, cultures. Dever set himself the task of developing a set of specifically archaeological “ethnic traits” that might be applied to early Israel. (The applause that greeted his presentation indicated that he had accomplished the task.)

The first ethnic marker he identified was what he called the environmental setting—nearly 300 small villages in the central highlands of Canaan, principally in Judea and Samaria, but also in the lower Galilee and northern Negev. In the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.), this area was sparsely settled; the Canaanites lived mostly in city-states in urban settings in the lowlands. The estimated population of the central hill country grew from about 12,000 in the Late Bronze Age to about 50,000 in the 12th century B.C. and to 75,000 in the 11th century B.C. This “population explosion” cannot be explained by natural increase alone, Dever said. It points to large-scale immigration by a new people.

An examination of the food system finds an almost complete absence of pig bones, which Dever considers one of the most conspicuous “ethnic markers of the early Israelites.”

The development of a new and distinctive architecture—the so-called four-room house—was used not only for domestic structures but for structures with other functions as well. This is another ethnic marker.^e

Dever noted that by the tenth century B.C., Hebrew—both the language and the script—had already diverged from sister languages such as Aramaic, Phoenician, Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite. Israel was not the only society that was emerging as a distinct ethnic group.

The Merneptah Stele, a hieroglyphic inscription that mentions the Israelites as a people inhabiting the central hill country of Canaan, can be dated with confidence to about 1210 B.C., clearly indicating that others (the powerful Egyptians) regarded Israel as an ethnic group.

Finally, Dever looked at the pottery assemblage from Iron Age II, beginning in about 900 B.C. He found it in “direct continuity with and deriving from the earlier Iron Age I assemblage.” In other words, the people in Iron II, who were inarguably Israelite, produced pottery developed from their ancestors in Iron I. Dever regarded this as “impeccable archaeological evidence,” especially when considered with the Merneptah Stele, that the Iron I people in the central highlands were Israelites and were considered by others to be Israelites—or “proto-Israelites,” to use Dever’s more cautious term.

Dever’s talk was a fitting conclusion to the ASOR meeting and left the audience hungry for more.

If you would like to participate in the excitement of either the ASOR meeting or the SBL meeting, come to Atlanta next year the week before Thanksgiving. I look forward to seeing you there.

“Come to our session on Megiddo,” a grinning Israel Finkelstein, director of Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology and co-director of the renewed excavations at Megiddo, urged me as we chatted at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in Toronto last November. “Lord Allenby will be there.” A magical name indeed. The legendary Edmund Allenby commanded Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary forces in World War I. On December 11, 1917, the last Turkish troops having fled, then-General Allenby made his official entry into Jerusalem by famously dismounting his horse and, out of respect for Jerusalem, walking […]