Endnote 2 – Royal Gateway to Ancient Jerusalem Uncovered

See Siegfried H. Horn, “Why the Moabite Stone Was Blown to Pieces,” BAR 12:03. In this article, Horn understands the word “Qorchah” in the stone’s text to refer to the name of a place—that is, a city. This is a hypothesis without foundation. There is no city that we know of by this name. It is generally accepted that Qorchah should be understood as part of Dibon, the capital of Moab, mainly because the whole paragraph concerns Mesha’s activity in Dibon. According to Benjamin Mazar (in Encyclopedia Biblica [Jerusalem: Tomus Quartus, 1962], p. 923, in Hebrew), the word “Qorchah” means the fortified palace of the king, based on ancient Mesopotamian records. On the basis of our discoveries in Jerusalem, it seems that the term “Ophel” refers to the fortified upper section of a capital city; in the Ophel can be found royal buildings and prestigious dwellings. The Qorchah was situated inside the Ophel. Thus, the prophet Elisha did not actually live in the area of the inner fortress of Samaria, but in the larger area of the Ophel, which was apparently on the lower terrace, inside what the excavators called the “lower wall.”