Books in Brief

006

The Walls of Jerusalem: From the Canaanites to the Mamluks

Gregory J. Wightman

(Sydney: Meditarch, 1993) 331 pp. 31 plates, Aus$170.00

The Walls of Jerusalem is the first comprehensive investigation of the fortifications of Jerusalem, and the scope of the book is matched by its thoroughness. Known for his excellent final report on the Damascus Gate excavations, author Gregory J. Wightman has incorporated virtually every scrap of archaeological and textual evidence available in 1990 to create an in-depth, detailed synthesis.

The archaeological remains of Canaanite and Israelite Jerusalem are few, and the major texts are either corrupt or obscure. Wightman’s ingenious efforts to extract reliable information are better repaid in his treatment of Hellenistic and Herodian Jerusalem. The latter is essentially a detailed discussion of material brought to light in the Citadel, the Herodian bastion just south of Jaffa Gate. Wightman clarifies the excavation reports by providing separate sketches for each of the six building phases. He also clarifies the relationships of the complex series of walls at the junction of the Tyropoeon and Kidron Valleys.

Wightman rightly argues that the Second Wall did not go through the area of the present Damascus Gate, but his reconstruction of the course of the wall is flawed by his acceptance of Josephus’ assertion that the two fortresses, the Herodian Antonia and the Hasmonean Baris, occupied the same site. The latter must be south of the “ditch” discovered by Warren, inside Bab en-Nazir, whereas the site of the former is confirmed by the four-meter-wide wall on the rock scarp, in the northwest corner of the Temple Mount esplanade. Wightman locates the Third Wall on the line of the present north wall and suggests that the function of a line of stones some 400 yards north of Damascus Gate was to keep Roman artillery out of range of the city.

Aelia Capitolina (the name the Romans gave Jerusalem when they rebuilt it in the second century A.D.), as Wightman points out, was an unwalled city until the beginning of the fourth century. The Roman emphasis on the western hill (the legion camp) was confirmed by a fifth-century construction of a wall enclosing Mount Zion and the eastern slopes by the Byzantine empress Eudocia, who lived in Jerusalem from 444 to 460 A.D. With the reconstruction and erection of great buildings along the southern edge of the Temple Mount in the seventh century, the Umayyads shifted the focus of Jerusalem back to the eastern hill. The culmination of this process was the abandonment of Mt. Zion and the Ophel Ridge in the tenth century when the fortifications were rebuilt by the Fatimids. The walls were torn down by an Ayyubid sultan in 1219 and not rebuilt until the mid-16th century, when Suleiman the Magnificent decided to restore the glory of Jerusalem.

Wightman has made a masterful and enduring contribution to our understanding of the extremely complex history of the walls of Jerusalem. With his unusual combination of literary and archaeological skills, he has been able to extract crucial information from a wide variety of sources. Fortunately, his cautious analyses and prudent assessments did not keep him from producing a series of marvelous city plans illustrating his conclusions. This book is indispensable for anyone seriously interested in the history of Jerusalem.

Shiloh. The Archaeology of a Biblical Site

Israel Finkelstein, ed.

(Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, 1993) 399 pp., $60.00

Shiloh, northeast of Jerusalem, was an early sanctuary of the Israelite tribal league where the Ark of the Covenant rested (Judges 18:31) and where the prophet Samuel was reared (1 Samuel 1–3). Shiloh was excavated by Danish archaeologists from 1926 to 1932, with the legendary W.F. Albright acting as advisor.^a The results, only partially published, have 008intrigued archaeologists and Biblical scholars ever since. Israel Finkelstein and a group of younger Israeli archaeologists excavated there from 1981 through 1984, a time when excellent, large-scale surveys of the West Bank (ancient Judea and Samaria) were made available—surveys that have forever changed our views about the origins of the Israelites in the central hill country.^b

This volume, the final report of the Israeli excavations,^c has been awaited with much expectation, largely because Shiloh is one of the very few excavated sites among the 300 or so known “Proto-Israelite” settlements; except for Finkelstein’s report on ‘Izbet Sartah, on the western border of the Judean foothills,^d Shiloh is the only final report available on the excavations of those settlements.

The volume’s first section presents Shiloh’s stratigraphy and architecture. The impressive Middle Bronze III (1650–1550 B.C.E.) fortifications include a city wall and massive embankment (Strata VIII–VII). There are only scant remains from the subsequent Late Bronze Age I (1550–1400 B.C.E.), or Stratum VI, consisting mostly of mixed occupational debris that the excavators believe includes some cultic material brought from elsewhere on the mound. This material was dumped into a favissa (a pit for cult-caches) that constituted, in the excavators’ opinion, a “shrine” of some sort. The most significant remains are in Stratum V, belonging to the Iron I period (1200–1000 B.C.E.), and include a series of well-preserved storerooms and pillared houses, set into the Middle Bronze embankment. In particular, the buildings numbered 312 and 335 produced a large collection of the famous “collared-rim jars,” associated with early Israelite settlements. The excavators state that “the Iron I assemblage from Shiloh is the richest found in any hill-country site”; Iron I materials were found in all excavated areas and usually in good contexts.

Finkelstein then turns his attention to the finds, presenting a substantial amount of pottery from all periods, with exemplary comparative discussion and very helpful, illustrated statistical discussions of types and distribution. The Iron I assemblage is indeed impressive and will constitute a point of departure for all subsequent treatments. However, Finkelstein’s date of “late 12th century and first half of the 11th century B.C.E.” should in my opinion be earlier at the beginning by at least half a century. The early cooking pots, for example, are identical to those at 010Bethel, Ai, Radanna, Giloh, ‘Izbet Sartah and other “Proto-Israelite” sites, which nearly all scholars (including Finkelstein himself) date to the late 13th or early 12th century B.C.E. Finkelstein’s arguments elsewhere that this Iron I hill-country pottery is substantially different from the repertoire of the lowland Late Bronze Age Canaanite urban center is due, I fear, to his presupposition that the hill-country settlers (he no longer calls them “Israelites,” as he did in 1988) were “local nomads” settling down.¹ If one looks closely at the Shiloh pottery, however, it is strongly in the overall Late Bronze tradition with respect to all individual types—the basic diagnostic criteria—a tradition that in the main areas of Palestine carries over into the early 12th century B.C.E. Only the relative percentages of types differ from Shiloh to the hill-country sites. In the hills, there are more storage jars, cooking pots and utilitarian vessels, exactly what we would expect at rural sites.² Thus the Shiloh pottery, and that of Palestine generally in the late 13th through the early 12th centuries B.C.E., when properly analyzed, reinforces Finkelstein’s own notion of “indigenous” origins for the Iron I hill-country settlers (and I would say of early Israel). It is a pity that preconceived notions of “nomadic origins” undercut the presentation of some of the most significant Iron I hill-country pottery that has yet been published.

Finkelstein also provides an analysis of the physical and chemical properties of metals and pottery. And he gives thorough and invaluable analyses of floral and faunal remains, together with a discussion of animal husbandry and subsistence systems. Of significance here is the fact that the herding of sheep and goats decreased and cattle-breeding increased in the early Iron I period; and pig bones are almost totally absent (0.07%).

Finkelstein’s conclusions regarding the historical and archaeological material are comprehensive and judicious, except for his problematic treatment of the date of the early Iron I settlement and its characterization (nomads settling down), as noted above. There are also places where speculation goes far beyond the archaeological evidence, as in the case of the Israelite shrine that Biblical tradition locates at Shiloh, but of which no trace has been found. The statement that “there is a high degree of probability that the Iron I sanctuary was located on or near the summit of the mound and that the pillared buildings of Area C were some of its auxiliary structures” is simply not credible. It was this sort of wishful thinking that discredited the older “Biblical archaeology.”

The rather forced discussion that tries to harmonize the excavated remains of Shiloh and the Biblical tradition is likewise unsatisfactory. Shiloh was an important early Israelite settlement (on which Finkelstein is somewhat contradictory, since he eschews the Biblical label, yet tries to connect the site with Biblical traditions), but there is no extra-Biblical evidence that it served as a “central shrine” of an amphictyony-like tribal league. Mainstream Biblical scholars gave up such notions a generation ago, and it is time that archaeologists do as well. The excavated material presented here by Finkelstein and his able colleagues is significant enough in itself; it does not need “enhancing” through forced connections with Biblical tradition. Such efforts do no justice to either discipline, or to the more sophisticated dialogue between them that is taking shape at last.

The Walls of Jerusalem: From the Canaanites to the Mamluks

Gregory J. Wightman

(Sydney: Meditarch, 1993) 331 pp. 31 plates, Aus$170.00