Ancient Israel is surely not remembered for its magnificent architecture. However, it did have one structure for which it is known in the scholarly literature: the so-called four-room house.
Houses of this type consisted of three long rooms and a transverse broad room. It was a simple structure and supposedly reflects ancient Israel’s egalitarian ethos.a It may seem strange that such a simple structure could be attached to but one culture. But so it seems.1
There were a number of variations in the four-room house. The rooms could be subdivided, so that some houses actually had five, six or even seven rooms. At least one of the rooms was assumed to be open to the sky. And the house had a second floor. And a roof—probably for sleeping. Incidentally, some animals also apparently lived in this largely people-inhabited house. It also had other variations. For example, the entrance could be either through the broad room or through one or another of the long rooms.
I was in Vienna recently and had a relaxed dinner with the distinguished Austrian Egyptologist Manfred Bietak. Some delicious Viennese cuisine made it especially pleasant. Of course we talked of many things, including the fact—as published long ago in BAR—that Manfred had found in some old Egyptian excavation records a workmen’s 051hut in the form of a four-room house.b The workmen who lived there had apparently been employed by Ramesses IV in the deliberate demolition of an Egyptian temple built by earlier Egyptian rulers Ay and Horemheb in around 1300 B.C.E.
Manfred had suggested in his BAR articlec that these workmen might be proto-Israelites living here before the Exodus from Egypt. The suggestion is more plausible because of the date of this four-room house (or hut; see drawing): Ramesses IV reigned in the early 12th century B.C.E., when proto-Israelites appear in Palestine.
This house in Medinet Habu, Egypt, also had something else somewhat unusual: the entrance was through the broad rear room. The same was also the case, Manfred told me, of another four-room house, one he had not referenced in his BAR article—an impressive Late Bronze Age building excavated at Tel Batash (Biblical Timnah; see drawing) in Israel by George Kelm of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and Amihai Mazar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
When I got to Israel, I telephoned Ami. He emphasized the difference in date: his four-room house from Tel Batash, although it was entered through the transverse room in the back of the house, was earlier than the one Bietak had identified in Egypt by as much as 200 years. But both dated to the time when Israelites began emerging in what became Israel, supposedly having come from Egypt.
Besides the Medinet Habu hut, one more four-room house outside Israel has been found at Tall al-‘Umayri in Jordan by a leading Canadian archaeologist, Larry Herr.2 It is sometimes argued that this four-room house shows that houses of this type were not used solely by Israelites, nor were they confined to Israelite sites. They may have been characteristic of a particular time but not confined to a particular place (i.e., Israel) or a particular culture (i.e., Israelite). So this argument goes.
The answer often given to this contention is that some early Israelite tribes settled east of the Jordan River, in what is now Jordan; at that time, ‘Umayri may have been an Israelite site. Here is one Biblical reference: “Then Joshua said to the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh, … ‘Let your wives, children and livestock remain in the land that Moses assigned to you on this [eastern] side of the Jordan’ ” (Joshua 1:12, Joshua 1:14, JPS; see also Numbers 32:33). Perhaps the four-room house from ‘Umayri should be identified with the Israelite tribes that remained for a time east of the Jordan—Reuben, Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh. If you look at a Biblical map, the territories of these Israelite tribes are within a stone’s throw of Tall al-‘Umayri. Larry Herr and Douglas R. Clark tell us that this four-room house was occupied for about 40 to 50 years, just before the time period when similar houses proliferated on the other, western side of the Jordan (particularly in the hill country where the Israelites are commonly thought to have emerged).3
While the ‘Umayri four-room house is the only fully excavated and published example of the type east of the Jordan, Herr and Clark report that there was “a rapid explosion of Iron I sites [east of the Jordan], not unlike that across the Jordan River to the west. And four-room houses appear at many of these locations as well, … in what would become Gilead, Ammon, Moab and Edom in the Iron II 052period.”4 This means that there are many four-room houses in the area the Bible assigns to the early settlement of Israelites east of the Jordan.
But there’s still another basic problem in identifying these houses as Israelite. It’s called circularity: We see four-room houses at Israelite sites as a marker of Israelites, and then we use the appearance of a four-room house to identify an Israelite site. Which came first—the chicken or the egg? We conclude from the common appearance of four-room houses in Israelite territory that they are a feature of Israelite culture. Then we use the appearance of these houses outside of Israelite territory to identify Israelites and Israelite culture in territories outside Israel.
The answer to this charge of circularity may be the fact that we can identify Israelite territory by a number of markers quite apart from the four-room house—the Biblical account, the pottery, burials or absence thereof, etc. If we can do this, we should be able to legitimately speculate that when four-room houses are found outside the areas not traditionally associated with Israelites, they suggest the presence of Israelites or proto-Israelites, especially when there are other indications (Biblical text, pottery) that there were Israelites here.
The issue of circularity is similarly relevant to presence of pig bones. The majority of Israelite sites have no pig bones. Israelites are forbidden to eat pork. Can we conclude that a site with pig bones is not Israelite, having used the absence of pig bones to identify a site as Israelite?d
No firm conclusions. Just a lot of food for thought.—H.S.
Are so-called four-room houses an infallible sign of Israelites’ presence just because many have been found at sites identified as Israelite? If you think they are, how do you avoid the pitfall of circular argumentation, which is implied in this reasoning? Hershel Shanks argues that we might need to look for other historical evidence before we draw conclusions of ethnicity from the floor plans of early Iron Age houses in Biblical lands.
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As the entry on “Four-Room House” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East puts it, “it seems legitimate to call this the Israelite House.” On the other hand, Bar-Ilan University professor Aren Maeir argues—in his review of Avraham Faust’s The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II in Review of Biblical Literature 09/2003—that there are “too many examples of this structure type [that have] been reported at non-Israelite/Judahite sites to enable a simplistic connection between this house and Israelite/Judahite culture,” citing as an example the four-room house at ‘Umayri in Jordan referred to later in this essay.
2.
Although the site is often spelled ‘Umeiri, the official spelling adopted by the Jordanian government is ‘Umayri.
3.
Larry G. Herr and Douglas R. Clark, “From the Stone Age to the Middle Ages in Jordan: Digging up Tall al-‘Umayri,” Near Eastern Archaeology 72.2 (2009), p. 85.
