Tripartite Buildings: Divided Structures Divide Scholars - The BAS Library
Login
Home > Magazines > BAR > May/June 1999

Tripartite Buildings: Divided Structures Divide Scholars

By Moshe Kochavi

BAR readers, as well as scholars, have long puzzled over the distinctive tripartite pillared buildings that have been discovered in so many excavations in Israel. Their architecture seems simple enough: long rectangular buildings divided into thirds by two rows of pillars that create a central hall and two side halls (hence the name tripartite). But what were they used for? The first BAR article on the subject appeared in 1976, when BAR was still a little 5- by 8-inch magazine printed in brown ink on cream-colored paper. In it we summarized the views of the eminent American archaeologist James […]

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1.

Moshe Kochavi, “Rescue in the Biblical Negev,” BAR 06:01.

Endnotes

1.

See “Megiddo Stables or Storehouses?” BAR 02:03.

2.

But he agreed with Yohanan Aharoni that the tripartite building that they had excavated at Hazor was a storehouse. See Yigael Yadin, “In Defense of the Stables at Megiddo,” BAR 02:03; and Hazor: The Head of All Those Kingdoms (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 167–192.

3.

John Currid, “Puzzling Public Buildings,” BAR 18:01.

4.

See Moshe Kochavi et al., “Rediscovered! The Land of Geshur,” BAR 18:04.

5.

Amnon Ben-Tor, “Hazor—1992–1993,” in Excavations and Surveys in Israel 14:101–102 (1994), pp. 9–13.

6.

See Larry Herr, “Tripartite Pillared Buildings and the Marketplace in Iron Age Israel,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 272 (1988), p. 47.

7.

John S. Holladay, Jr., “The Stables of Ancient Israel,” in The Archaeology of Jordan and Other Studies, ed. Lawrence T. Geraty and Larry G. Herr (Berrien Springs: Andrews Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 103–165.

8.

Herr, “Tripartite Pillared Buildings,” p. 47.

9.

Ze’ev Herzog, “The Storehouses,” in Beer-Sheba I, ed. Yohanan Aharoni (Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, 1973), pp. 23–30.

10.

Herr, “Tripartite Pillared Buildings,” p. 42.