Endnote 1 – The Four-Room House

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.