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There’s no place like (an Israelite 4-room) home. Archaeologists sometimes use these unique structures as an index to determine where Israelites settled during the Iron Age. The simplest four-room house consists of a long narrow back room with three rooms, separated by pillars, jutting from it.

None of the Iron Age four-room houses at Mizpah was fully excavated (and thus none appears clearly on the plan). During the Babylonian and Persian periods, four-room houses such as this one continued to be built at Mizpah, although they almost doubled in size, indicating the increased prosperity of the later city. The continued use of Israelite architectural forms through this period calls into question the account, in 2 Kings 25:12, of a mass exile of the Jews.