Strata

018

Palatial Discovery

Walls May Have Been Part of Herod’s Palace

Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) archaeologists have unearthed a pair of thick parallel walls in the Old City of Jerusalem that they believe supported the foundation for King Herod’s palace. The walls were found near Jaffa Gate and just south of the Citadel, which today houses the Tower of David Museum in the Old City of Jerusalem.

“We have the monumental remains of a large building from the first century B.C. to the first century A.D.,” said IAA Jerusalem regional archaeologist Jon Seligman. “In all likelihood we are talking about the remains of Herod’s palace.”

The archaeologists base their identification of the walls on the writings of Flavius Josephus, the first-century A.D. Jewish historian whose architectural descriptions have generally proven accurate. According to Josephus, Herod’s palace stood immediately to the south of the Citadel, just where the supporting walls were found.

The parallel walls, about 5 to 8 feet thick, were discovered 20 to 25 feet below a 19th-century Ottoman prison and reach all the way down to the bedrock. Archaeologists believe the walls were used to make the surrounding area level in much the same way that the steep Temple Mount was modified to build Herod’s Temple. “These could be terrace walls used to support the building platform for Herod’s palace,” said Seligman.

Archaeologists also found two walls from earlier periods nearby. One is part of a Hasmonean-era wall (141–63 B.C.), through which a drainage channel had been cut during the Herodian period (37 B.C.–70 A.D.). The size of the channel indicates that the drain must have served a monumental building on the site.

The other older wall is aligned slightly differently from the Herodian walls and dates to the seventh-sixth centuries B.C. Seligman posits that this might be part of the city wall of Jerusalem of that period.

“If this is the case it may answer one of our major questions about the size of ancient Jerusalem, between the minimalist view and the maximalist view,” he said. Scholars who hold the minimalist view believe that the city of Jerusalem only extended to what today is the Jewish Quarter; maximalists argue that the city borders encompassed the western hill of the city, as far as today’s Jaffa Gate.

Unfortunately, the full length of the old wall, together with the buried palace of Herod and its supporting walls, though tantalizing to archaeologists and scholars, must for now remain unknown. They all extend under the police station in the Old City and cannot be excavated.

The current excavation, directed by IAA archaeologist Amit Re’em, is sponsored by the Jerusalem Foundation for the Tower of David Museum. The museum plans to build an educational center at the site, which is scheduled to open in about two years.

019

BAR in Trouble? No—Just in Jeopardy!

Well Actually, Double Jeopardy …

Recently BAR readers were surprised and delighted to see our publication featured prominently on Jeopardy!, one of America’s most popular game shows. On June 29, the categories for Double Jeopardy—the second half of the show, in which questions are worth from $200 to $1,000—were all popular magazines. The fourth of the six publications that host Alex Trebek named was none other than … you guessed it … Biblical Archaeology Review. (The other categories, were Readers Digest, Gourmet, Home, Elle and “Gee Q” (instead of GQ, formerly known as Gentleman’s Quarterly).

It didn’t take long to get to the BAR category. After the advertising copywriter who opened the round flubbed a “Gee Q” question, university administrator Bonnie Zaben, from New York city, requested “Biblical Archaeology Review for $200.” It was an easy one: “Some archaeologists think the site of this first patriarch’s home was in Iraq, some in Turkey.” She answered, without pause, “Who is Abraham?” (Remember that Jeopardy! provides the answers and the contestants must supply the correct question.)

The contestants then went straight through all the questions in the BAR column before moving on to the other magazines.

How would you have done if you had been among them? Here are the remaining answers from Jeopardy!’s BAR category. The correct questions appear below. No peeking!

1) For $400: “The 2000 discovery of 7,500-year-old artifacts deep in this ‘colorful’ Asian sea suggests a deluge-like flood.”

2) For $600: “A stele unearthed in 1993 in these ‘heights’ bears the name of King David and may confirm his historic reality.”

3) For $800: “Recent studies of this historic biblical linen have focused on pollens embedded in it.”

4) And for a whopping $1,000: “The 1999 removal of tons of rock and soil from this Jerusalem ‘mount’ caused great archaeological controversy.”

Questions:

1) None of the contestants got this right, BAR was surprised to see. Incorrect guesses included “What is the Yellow Sea?” and “What is the Red Sea?” The correct answer, of course, was “What is the Black Sea?”

2) Zaben got this one easily: “What is the Golan Heights?”

3) The third contestant, Kevin Keach, an operations manager from Ste. Anne, Missouri, got this one: “What is the Shroud of Turin?”

4) Contestant Zaben quickly provided the right answer: “What is the Temple Mount?” We hope she’s a BAR reader!

Scroll Exhibit Cancelled After Attacks

The September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon have had a ripple effect in the world of Biblical archaeology: a planned exhibit of some 55 Dead Sea Scrolls at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City has been cancelled. The decision was made by the Salt Lake Organizing Committee and by Brigham Young University, the two organizations that had made plans to display the scrolls. In a joint statement, the two groups said, “The decision was reached principally because of the uncertainty surrounding sharply escalating insurance costs and the challenges of transporting priceless artifacts.” The exhibit would have been the largest ever scrolls display outside of Israel.

020

More Caves Found at Qumran

Report Details Decade-Old Work

Anyone who has ever visited Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, cannot help but be impressed with the isolation of the place.

Well, not quite. The apparent isolation can be deceptive. An archaeological survey of the area around Qumran conducted in 1952 as part of the excavation by Père Roland de Vaux discovered 55 sites, including numerous caves, that showed signs of human use. Between 1988 and 1992 additional surveys were conducted by a team headed by Robert Eisenman of California State University, Long Beach. In the area that de Vaux surveyed, Eisenman found an additional 12 caves that showed human use. Further south (as far as the Wadi Murabb’at), the Eisenman team found an additional 25 caves that showed signs that they had been lived in. One of the caves south of Qumran had a beautifully built door, complete with lintel and sideposts. “There was much greater habitation over a much wider area than had previously been thought,” Eisenman writes in the latest issue of The Qumran Chronicle (December 2000, p. 123) in which the survey results are reported.

The Eisenman team naturally hoped to find more scrolls, but in this they were disappointed. “In almost all cases the Bedouin had been there before us,” Eisenman writes.

Among the team’s other finds was a carefully built lookout, with a reinforced wall overlooking the Dead Sea. “The complex, some 200 meters (650 feet) up [from the valley floor], blended into the cliff face and was not visible from the road along the Dead Sea shores at all, but it and the ledge upon which it stands is covered with pottery remains, much of it from the Second Temple Period [at the turn of the era],” writes Eisenman.

More archaeological exploration took place at Qumran this past summer. We will report on the newest findings in future issues.

New Reading of MMT Made

But Will Qimron Allow It to See the Light of Day?

According to reliable sources, a prominent German Dead Sea Scroll scholar has found a new way to reconstruct the document known as MMT. It is significantly different from the reconstruction made by Elisha Qimron, the Israeli scholar who successfully sued the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) for publishing a reconstruction of the document and for whose reconstruction he claimed principal credit.

MMT is generally considered one of the most important Dead Sea Scrolls in the entire collection. It reveals the schism between the Dead Sea Scroll sectarians and the dominant Jewish authorities of the time. Six copies of the document, in 70 fragments, have survived from antiquity. Although Qimron has claimed credit for the reconstruction—and sued BAS on that basis—another prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholar, Florentino García Martínez of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has analyzed early work on this reconstruction—before Qimron had access to the fragments—and concluded that the work was almost all done by Qimron’s junior colleague, John Strugnell, the Harvard professor to whom publication of the document was originally assigned.^a According to García-Martínez, the reconstruction of “the isolated fragments … and the combination of various manuscripts” were “substantially completed” before Qimron entered the picture.^b

Now, another competing reconstruction is floating around, the work of a well-known German scholar who is afraid to publish it for fear Qimron will sue him. The latest word from this scholar is that he will write to Qimron at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, asking for permission to publish his competing reconstruction, which naturally in some parts tracks Qimron’s claimed reconstruction. If Qimron grants permission, the competing reconstruction will be published. The scholarly community eagerly awaits this new reconstruction and hopes Qimron will permit its publication.