Yes There Was

039

Let me begin with several basic facts—more historical than archaeological—on which Joseph Blenkinsopp and I can agree.

When the Babylonians arrived in the Land of Israel, there were no fewer than eight independent kingdoms there and in Transjordan: four kingdoms of the Philistines—Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Ekron; the Kingdom of Judah; and three kingdoms in Transjordan—Ammon, Moab and Edom. With the Babylonian penetration from 604–582 B.C.E., these all disappeared! There were no more independent kingdoms in the Land of Israel. What happened to them and who was responsible?

The four Philistine kingdoms all had similar relations with Babylon and all shared the same fate: They were destroyed to their foundations, and no amount of clever discourse will save Ashdod from the same fate as Ashkelon (as seen in Lawrence Stager’s excavations) or Ekron (as revealed in Seymour Gitin’s work there). In short, the Philistines were destroyed or exiled; they never returned to the Land of Israel. From that point on, there were no more Philistines! The renewed settlement along the coast, after a hiatus, was done by another, primarily Phoenician, population. Thus, the total change in the population of the southern coast during the Persian period was a result of the Babylonian destruction.

As for the Kingdom of Judah, which is the central theme of our discussion: There is no dispute, either historical or archaeological, that its two main cities, Jerusalem and Lachish, were destroyed and that the kingdom ceased to exist. The only room for disagreement may be over the extent of destruction in the area between these two cities. I believe that the entire area between them was also destroyed by the Babylonians. After the Babylonian conquest, the Jews disappeared from most of Mt. Hebron and from approximately two-thirds of the area previously ruled by the kingdom of Judah. It was settled by another people, the Edomites, beginning in the Persian period (not, however, early in this period; all of the Persian period material found in this region—both written and pertaining to the material culture—dates from the fourth century B.C.E. on). The Edomites settled the empty and virtually abandoned areas of southern Judah (including the city of Lachish itself). So this, too, represented a total change in population, just as in the Philistine coastal area.

Where did the Jews from this area go, asks Blenkinsopp, and when did this occur—before the Babylonians destroyed Lachish II, or after? I have never claimed that the land was entirely emptied, and it is very likely that, here and there, rural settlements remained, as attested in surveys and excavations. But what political or other significance can a defeated population have when it has no significant urban centers, when its religious center has been burned down, when its primary trade routes no longer exist, and when it no longer has its own government?

Although I have not claimed that the land was entirely abandoned, distinctions must be made between fundamentally different population densities. When my family arrived in the Land of Israel in 1800, for example, there were 300,000 inhabitants on both sides of the Jordan. Today there are some 13–14 million people living there. Still, it cannot be said that the land was empty in 1800—only that it was sparsely populated.

Thus far, we have sketched the general historical and archaeological background to the Babylonian catastrophe. We now move to the detailed archaeological discussion presented by Blenkinsopp, and I must confess that here I find myself in a difficult position. Professor Blenkinsopp is simply not an archaeologist, and if we were to place vessels from the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E. in front of him, I frankly doubt that he would be able to distinguish among them. That simply requires years of specialization.

Blenkinsopp utilizes archaeology at second or third hand, sometimes quoting scholars who died decades ago (Albright and Wright). What their opinions would be today, nobody knows. It is not possible to conduct a detailed and specific scholarly debate with someone who isn’t intimately familiar with the finds themselves. Therefore, I will refrain from discussing the sites one by one and presenting the reader with the finds from each of them (as ought to be done). I will instead present a few illustrative examples.

The first concerns Albright’s excavation at Tell Beit Mirsim, for which I am most frequently criticized. The correction proposed by Aharoni, Ussishkin and Greenberg involves the severity of the Assyrian destruction that brought the city to an end in 701 B.C.E., a matter previously ignored by Albright. I have no argument with these later corrections. Moreover, as more excavations are carried out, particularly in western Judah, this picture becomes increasingly clear and is best reflected today in the Lachish excavations (level III). But the question is not whether Tell Beit Mirsim was destroyed by the Assyrians in 701 B.C.E.—it certainly was—but whether it was rebuilt (even on a smaller scale) and finally destroyed by the Babylonians only in 586 B.C.E., a destruction from which it never rose again. Everyone familiar with the specific finds dated to the end of the Kingdom of Judah (and who is not merely quoting others) can detect, among the few finds Albright published, pottery that clearly attests to the renewal of the settlement, or part of it, after the Assyrian destruction.

055

Another example is Beth-Shemesh, to which Blenkinsopp gives considerable attention. Recent excavations conducted there by Tel Aviv University have uncovered a late-seventh-century B.C.E. settlement that was Judahite; its pottery is identical to that of Ein Gedi or the destruction layers of Jerusalem rather than to a settlement in the Shephelah, the area of low hills between the coastal plain and the hill country of Judah. The Beth-Shemesh settlement also had a complicated water system that was destroyed at the end of the Iron Age by the Babylonians—either in 604–601 B.C.E. when the Philistine coastal cities were destroyed, or possibly later in 586 B.C.E. when the Babylonians destroyed Judah, of which Beth-Shemesh was a part.

All of the other Judahite Shephelah towns around Lachish met the same fate at the hands of the Babylonians. Even non-archaeologists may compare the map of the distribution of rosette seal impressions examined by Jane Cahill,^a characteristic of end of the Judahite Kingdom before the Babylonian destruction, with the distribution of the l’melekh (“belonging to the king”) seal impressions that are characteristic of the period before the Assyrian destruction at the end of the eighth century B.C.E. By itself, such a comparison clearly shows to what extent the Judahite kingdom succeeded in reconstructing the settlements that had been destroyed by the Assyrians—even without considering the contents of the well-known Lachish Letters, which further document this rebuilding. Nothing similar is found after the Babylonian destruction—not a single bit of evidence, not a document. Complete silence.

Let us now consider Megiddo. Megiddo (stratum III) is indeed a splendid city from the Assyrian period, in my opinion and everybody else’s. (Level III is the only level at Megiddo whose date, to the best of my knowledge, has not been challenged.) Blenkinsopp quotes the view of Shiloh and Ussishkin that the level III city was not destroyed at all or, alternatively, that it was not the Babylonians who destroyed it but the Egyptians in 609 B.C.E. Unfortunately, neither Shiloh nor Ussishkin were able to excavate strata II-I (essentially two phases of a single stratum) because the American excavations of 80 years ago left virtually no trace of them. (Only segments of the Assyrian stratum III were excavated by Ussishkin’s colleague, Israel Finkelstein.) As far as I know, I am the only archaeologist who went to the trouble of checking and reconstructing all of the loci from strata I and II from the American excavation and checking all the finds. My view today, having accrued 40 years additional experience, is that strata II-I, during which Megiddo became a very small, unwalled city protected only by a citadel, are dated exclusively to the Persian period. I can only await the archaeologist who will prove otherwise.

What then happened to the flourishing Assyrian city of Megiddo that served as the capital of the Assyrian province? There are two major possibilities. One is that its inhabitants abandoned it of their own accord (for there appears to have been no destruction)—but that seems unlikely. However, if we adopt the alternate explanation—that the stratum III city was destroyed by the Egyptians in 609 B.C.E. and not by the Babylonians in 605 B.C.E.—it makes little difference. There is only a four-year difference and not even the most experienced archaeologist can distinguish between such close dates. The debate is thus historical rather than archaeological. Even if Megiddo III was destroyed by the Egyptians (and it is not clear to me why the Egyptians would destroy the capital city of their ally’s province), the 609 B.C.E. battle of Megiddo between Egypt and Judah was part of a larger war waged by Assyria and Egypt against Babylonia. These events are related to the emergence of Babylonia as a power in the Levant, and so in either case the destruction was caused by the wars against the Babylonians.

These examples, I believe, are sufficient. To sum up, even though there were previous Assyrian destructions (or more local destructions by the Edomites), the archaeological record—to someone experienced in interpreting it—clearly demonstrates that the final destruction of Judah and its neighbors by the Babylonians from 604 to 586 B.C.E. produced a settlement vacuum followed by a major exchange of population in the region.

Let me begin with several basic facts—more historical than archaeological—on which Joseph Blenkinsopp and I can agree.