Rejected! Qeiyafa’s Unlikely Second Gate - The BAS Library
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Rejected! Qeiyafa’s Unlikely Second Gate

By Yosef Garfinkel, Saar Ganor, Joseph Baruch Silver

Excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa have uncovered a second city gate from the 10th century B.C.E., the time of King David’s reign. No other site from this period has more than one gate. What do Qeiyafa’s two city gates tell us about the Kingdom of Judah in David’s time?

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Footnotes

1.

See Doron Ben-Ami, “Mysterious Standing Stones,” BAR 32:02.

2.

Yosef Garfinkel, Michael Hasel and Martin Klingbeil, “An Ending and a Beginning,” BAR 39:06.

3.

Hershel Shanks, “Prize Find: Oldest Hebrew Inscription Discovered in Israelite Fort on Philistine Border,” BAR 36:02.

4.

Madeleine Mumcuoglu and Yosef Garfinkel, “The Puzzling Doorways of Solomon’s Temple,” BAR 41:04.

Endnotes

1.

Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor, Khirbet Qeiyafa Vol. 1: Excavation Report 2007–2008 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2009); Yosef Garfinkel, Saar Ganor and Michael G. Hasel, Khirbet Qeiyafa Vol. 2: Excavation Report 2009–2013: Stratigraphy and Architecture (Areas B, C, D, E) (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2014).

2.

Israel Finkelstein and Alexander Fantalkin, “Khirbet Qeiyafa: An Unsensational Archaeological and Historical Interpretation,” Tel Aviv 39 (2012), pp. 38–63.

3.

Nadav Na’aman, “In Search of the Ancient Name of Khirbet Qeiyafa,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 8 (2008), pp. 2–8.

4.

Finkelstein and Fantalkin, “Khirbet Qeiyafa,” p. 57.

5.

Finkelstein and Fantalkin, “Khirbet Qeiyafa,” p. 45.

6.

Regarding the southern gate, Finkelstein and Fantalkin argue that “the restoration of the gate goes far beyond the actual data uncovered during the excavation: evidence for some of the piers of the gate is lacking; in the eastern wing of the gate the central pier is restored from a wall that blocks the gate’s entryway; and in the western wing the inner (northern) pier does not exist and the central pier is restored from a short stub” (Finkelstein and Fantalkin, “Khirbet Qeiyafa,” p. 46). In fact, however, more than 80% of the original gate has been preserved, including parts of each of the badly preserved piers.

7.

In addition, the casemate entrances in the city wall also indicate that the gates should be dated to the Iron Age. In the casemates located to the right of each gate, the entrances are located in the right-hand corner of the casemates. In the casemates located to the left of each gate, the entrances are located in the left-hand corner of the casemates. Such a pattern could have been created only when the gates and the city wall were built as one unit.