Prize Finds

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The Bull from the Sea: Geshur’s Chief Deity?

A bull-headed figure stares belligerently from this basalt stela, challenging archaeologists with an apparently unprecedented find. Stelae are rarely found in Israel, though they have been discovered throughout the rest of the ancient Near East. Unearthed during the 1997 season at Bethsaida, the bull stela faces front and is armed with long horns and a short dagger. A strap wraps around the bull’s body and the stela’s frame, and four small circular projections protrude from a spot next to the bull’s chest. The stela had been smashed; it was found in pieces, with its upper portion lying at the foot of a high place beside a massive city gate on Bethsaida’s east side. The extensive architecture by the gate suggests the site, which once was on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, was the capital of the Geshurites, the inhabitants of a district between Philistia and Sinai (Joshua 13:2). The bull depicts the city’s chief deity, who symbolically embraces and protects the city. Likely destroyed during the Assyrian conquest of Tiglath-pileser III (732 B.C.E.), the stela recalls Lamentations 4:1: “The sacred stones lie scattered at the head of every courtyard.”

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Big-Game Hunting: The Lion of Hazor

I thought I could make out the curve of an animal’s head, and then I saw what looked like its tail. I shouted, “Lion! Lion!” The others thought I must have lost my mind, but when they carefully lowered the large basalt stone to the ground they could clearly see, through layers of mud, the outline of a giant crouching lion.

It was almost noon on Wednesday, May 14th, 1997. Four of us—Shaul, the expedition administrator; Hussein, the head of the Druze worker team; Nabil, the backhoe operator; and I, the excavation director from Hebrew University—were preparing Hazor for its eighth excavation season. We were rigging up sunshades over the sections to be excavated, connecting the water supply and dismantling the walls of buildings that had been unearthed in previous seasons and were now preventing further excavation in the area.

“To excavate is to destroy” someone once said, and it is true that fully studied and recorded buildings are frequently dismantled, especially if they cannot be transferred to another location on the site. Before we discovered the lion, we had spent several hours clearing a huge building dating to the Assyrian period (late eighth century B.C.). The building had been destroyed in antiquity; not even its floors were preserved. All of the stones from this building were heavy, weighing many hundreds of pounds—one foundation stone weighed a ton. It was nicely cut, with exact angles and smooth sides, but I didn’t recognize it as a lion until it was lifted up with the backhoe. That’s when I let out the shout that startled my coworkers.

When we cleaned it off we discovered it was an almost intact lion orthostat designed to sit in the left side of an entrance. From its style, we dated it to between the 15th and 14th century B.C. Such lions frequently stood as guardians at the entrances to palaces or temples, as is well known from sites all over the ancient Near East—in the Syrian, Assyrian, Hittite and neo-Hittite kingdoms, to name a few.

As I looked at the lion, in my mind I saw the late Yigael Yadin, who had headed the large-scale excavations of Hazor in the 1950s and 1960s. Almost 40 years ago Yadin had found the exact match to our lion buried in a pit near the entrance to one of Hazor’s Canaanite temples. That lion had originally stood to the right of an entrance. He had searched in vain for another one.

The one we found may be the missing lion. The two are practically identical and constitute a perfect left/right pair. (We could tell what side of the building they used to be on because only one side of the stone was carved.) But “our” lion was on the Hazor acropolis, more than half a mile from the one Yadin found in the lower city to the north. Did someone find it in the eighth century and drag it, though it weighed a ton, all the way to the acropolis just to bury it in the foundations of a building? Or was there more than one pair of lions at Hazor?

Yadin’s team also found another part of a lion on the acropolis during the 1958 season—a lioness’s front half. He wrote, “This … is not the missing orthostat of the temple pair, but it indicates that lion orthostats must have been rather popular at Hazor … both we and the lion … would give a great deal to find the hind part of the lioness.”

During the 1997 season we also found this lioness’s hind quarters in the doorjamb of a building of the Israelite period, less than 100 yards away from where Yadin discovered the lioness’s front. Thus, in the past season, two mysteries have been solved at Hazor, but one still remains—we now have three lions. The lioness was a right-side orthostat unearthed near the new-left side lion, so perhaps they were a pair. This male/female pairing would be unusual in orthostats, but it would make a complete pair. Or we may have three half-pairs on our hands. We’ll be looking for more lions in the upcoming season. Will you join us for some happy hunting?

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Israelite Cult Stand: Survivor of the Assyrian Conquest

This unique cult stand was found amid debris more than 3 feet thick in a domestic section of the last Israelite occupation of Megiddo (eighth century B.C.). Collapsed walls and roofs and more than 100 pottery vessels of all types—one of the richest Israelite pottery assemblages ever found—surrounded it, the first clear evidence of the fall of Israelite Megiddo to the Assyrians during Tiglath-pileser III’s conquest of Palestine in 733–732 B.C. The cult stand and other objects were excavated from the northern section of the mound, adjacent to the city wall. No one knows the precise use of such stands; this one may have been used to burn incense. It is intriguing that it was found in a simple house rather than in a shrine.

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The Goddess of Rehov

Imagine staring down at the ground in wonder as something emerging from beneath a carefully wielded trowel stares back. The head of a goddess (above), most likely a fertility figurine, slowly surfaced this way during the first season of excavations at Tel Rehov.

Rehov, whose name means “street” in Hebrew, dominated the north-south road along the Jordan Valley, a mere 3 miles from Beth-Shean. Egyptian sources from the 15th to 13th centuries B.C. refer to the site as an important Canaanite city, but until excavations started there last year, little else was known about it. More than 100 volunteers from 14 countries came and opened up five areas on the two-level, 38-acre site. They found a large Bronze Age and Iron I city destroyed in the tenth century B.C., perhaps by Shishak’s invasion of Israel after the death of Solomon. In an open space, probably a courtyard, in the eastern end of the lower level of this ruined city, just below the topsoil, lay the goddess’s head. The fragments of a large ritual stand and two other clay figurines were discovered nearby. Such figurines are well known and likely represented fertility goddesses. It is difficult to identify the figurine in more detail without its body. In any case, the figurine’s facial features and headdress make her unique.

The Bull from the Sea: Geshur’s Chief Deity?