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Surprises at Yattir: Unexpected Evidence of Early Christianity

By Hanan Eshel, Jodi Magness, Eli Shenhav

Archaeology is full of surprises. Sometimes we don’t find what we had expected to find. Or we find something we never expected to find. Either way, the experience is always exciting—and wonderful. A good case in point is our excavation at Khirbet Yattir (khirbet is Arabic for “ruins of”), a ten-acre mound in southern Judah. We were attracted to Khirbet Yattir because it was a virgin site. It lies just west of the Green Line, which marks the pre-1967 border of Israel. That probably accounts for the fact that it had never been excavated; until the 1967 Six-Day […]

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Endnotes

1.

Eusebius, Onomasticon 11.4–9, in Ferdinand Larsow and Gustav Parthey, eds., Eusebii Pamphili Episcopi Caesariensis Onomasticon (Paris: Berolini, 1862), p. 233.
For more on the Darom and its villages, see Avi-Yonah, The Jews of Palestine, A Political History from the Bar Kokhba War to the Arab Conquest (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), pp. 16, 139; Joshua Schwartz, Jewish Settlement in Judaea After the Bar-Kochba War Until the Arab Conquest (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1986), pp. 36–38, 41, 98–109 (in Hebrew); Yuval Baruch, “Tell Ziph and the Establishment of Christianity in the South of Hebron Mountain [sic],” in Yaakov Eschel, ed., Judea and Samaria Research Studies, Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting, 1998 (Kedumim-Ariel: The Research Institute, College of Judea and Samaria, 1999), p. 180 (in Hebrew).

2.

This inscription, as well as the one in the atrium and the one in Area D (see below), was read by E. Shenhav and Leah Di Segni.

3.

The Byzantine method of dating according to the “indiction” was based on a 15-year cycle between assessments of property for purposes of taxation. Our date creates a two-year discrepancy between the two indiction years. We have not yet been able to resolve this discrepancy.

4.

See, for example, Michael Avi-Yonah, The Holy Land from the Persian to the Arab Conquest (586 B.C.-A.D. 640): A Historical Geography (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1977), p. 161: The Darom’s “distinguishing characteristic was that ut contained an unusually high number of Jewish settlements which had apparently survived Bar-Kokhba’s War.”