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"Again he began to teach by the lakeside, but such a huge crowd gathered round him that he got into a boat on the lake and sat there. The people were all along the shore, at water's edge." Mark 4:1 (JB)

Publishedwith the financialassistanceof ZION RESEARCH FOUNDATION Boston, Massachusetts A nonsectarianProtestantfoundation for the study of the Bible and the historyof the ChristianChurch

Seals

Cylinder

of Third-Millennium Palestine Ben-Tor Amnon The first part consists of a detailedcatalog,includingline drawings and photographs of all third-millennium cylinder seals and seal impressions found in Palestine. The major part comprises a discussion of the artistic motifs, geographical distribution, comparativematerialfromneighboringcountriesand chronologyof the seals and seal impressions.Finally,the placeof the glypticartof Palestinein the context of that of the entire ancient Near East is reviewed.

Biblical Archeologist is published quarterly (March, May, September, December) by the American Schools of Oriental Research in cooperation with Scholars Press. Its purpose is to provide the general reader with an accurate scholarly yet easily understandable account of archeological discoveries, and their bearing on the biblical heritage. Unsolicited mss. are welcome but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Address all to Biblical editorial correspondence Archeologist, 1053 LSA Building, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. Address business correspondence to Scholars Press, .P,-O.Box 5207, Missoula, MT 59806.

Copyright ? 1977 American Schools of Oriental Research. Annual Subscription: $10.00. Current single issues: $2.50. Printed in the United States of America, Printing Department, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812.

Editor: David Noel Michigan

Freedman,

University

of

77-13226

ISBN0-89130-188-7

AvailableJanuary,1978

PRSS SCHOLARS OF MONTANA UNIVERSITY

Order No. 100022

MONTANA 59812 MISSOULA,

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Editorial Committee: Frank M. Cross, Harvard University Edward F. Campbell, Jr., McCormick Theological Seminary John S. Holladay, Jr., University of Toronto H. Darrell Lance, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School

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Cover Galilee-Site Sketch of CapernaumAmphitheater.

Credits: "The Acoustics of Crowd Capacity of Natural Theaters in Palestine:"charts by Mark Myles, c/o Bolt, Beranek & Newman Inc.; photographs by Mark Myles and B. Cobbey Crisler, c/o B. Cobbey Crisler. "The Search for Maccabean Gezer:"Fig. 1 by R. A. Lyons, Fig. 2 by Susan Moddel, Fig. 3 by R. A. Lyons; all figures c/ o Joe D. Seger. "Kadesh-barnea: Judah's Last Outpost:" Fig. 2 c/o Carol Meyers, Rudolph Cohen, and the Israeli Department of Antiquities and Museums; Fig. 1 c/o Richard W. Cleave. "St. Paul Shipwrecked in Dalmatia:" all illustrations c/doOtto F. A. Meinardus.

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BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

B. Cobbey Crisler

128

THE ACOUSTICS AND CROWD CAPACITY OF NATURAL THEATERS IN PALESTINE A manwitha pinand sevenredballoons,standingon a rockin the Lake of Galilee,devisesa remarkablearcheologicaltest.

Joe D. Seger

142

THE SEARCH FOR MACCABEAN GEZER Macalister's"MaccabeanCastle"has now been recognizedas a Solomonicgate.Butthenwhereis thegarrisonof 1 Maccabees13?

Otto F. A. Meinardus

145

ST. PAUL SHIPWRECKED IN DALMATIA Themongooserunswildin onlyone placein Europe,anda slender oral traditionlinks St. Paul to just that spot.

Carol Meyers

148

KADESH BARNEA: JUDAH'S LAST OUTPOST New evidenceon the tenacityof Judeansettlersin the northern Negeb.

George E. Mendenhall

152

"CHANGE AND DECAY IN ALL AROUND I SEE": CONQUEST, COVENANT, AND THE TENTH GENERA TION Further reflections on a famous hypothesis that traumatic political and culturaldiscontinuityoccurredroughlyevery250 yearsin the ancientworld.

122

A LETTER TO THE READERS

124

POLEMICS & IRENICS

125

NEWS FROM THE FIELD

158

TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO

160

COLOPHON

A LETTER TO THE READERS

Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary offers two developed meanings of the word culture. The first is: enlightenmentand excellenceof taste acquiredby intellectualand aesthetictraining. The second is: a. a particularstage of advancementin civilization. b. the characteristicfeaturesof such a stage or state. c. behaviortypicalof a groupor class. Of these two meanings, the first is value-laden, and the second aspires to be value-free. When we speak of "a gentleman of culture,"we have the first meaning in mind. When we speak of "the culture of the Trobriand Islands," we have the second meaning in mind. Biblical archeology began as the recovery of the material remains of a set of cultures prized rather than studied, reverentlycelebrated ratherthan dispassionately examined. To be sure, the ancient Israelite and early Christian cultures were not honored for their aesthetic brilliance nor, without heavy qualification, for their intellectual power. But as Athens for thought and Rome for government, so Jerusalem was the model for religion and morality; and the recoveryof Jerusalem'sculture was the effort to unclog a tributaryflowing into a riveralready swift and sure in its course: the main stream of European culture. Scientific archeology, by contrast, arose as the study of the material remains of cultures understood in the second of the two quoted senses; and it arose when -

122

and perhaps because - Europe had begun to lose confidence in its synthesis of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. Scientific archeology, to no small extent, was an anxious search for better alternatives. In Archaeologists and What They Do, Robert J. Braidwood made this distinction as follows: Some archaeologistswho have written about the historyof thisbranchof knowledgespeakof twoseparate and distinctarchaeologies.The first archaeology,they say,aroseduringthegreatrebirthof intellectualcuriosity, the Renaissance,whichspreadfromItalyinto the restof Europe following about A.D. 1400. This intellectual curiosity had as a particularfocus of attention the antiquityof Greece,Rome,and the Biblelands.Johann a Germanbornin 1717,whospentmostof Winckelmann, his life as an art historianin Rome, is often called the "father of archaeology." Winckelmann wrote, for example,that "by no people has beautybeen so highly esteemedas by the Greeks."The archaeologistswho followed in the intellectualtraditionof Winckelmann had,as a rule,littleinterestin any otherpastthanthatof Greece, Rome, or the Bible lands. Nor were these archaeologistsmuch interestedin the objects that the ordinaryGreekor Romanor NearEasterneruseddaily. The archaeologists of the Winckelmann fine-arts traditionconcentratedtheirstudyon suchthingsas vase painting,sculpture,and monumentalarchitecture. The secondor alternatestreamof archaeologyis said to havearisenjust over one hundredyearsago, as partof the greatburstof interestin the naturalsciences.

DECEMBER 1976

The appearanceof CharlesDarwin'sOriginof Speciesin 1859and of Sir CharlesLyell'sTheAntiquityof Manin 1863could perhapsbe takenas the base line of serious archaeologyin the traditionof the naturalsciences.It was, however,the earlysociologistsandanthropologists, such as the AmericanLewis Henry Morgan and the EnglishmenHerbertSpencerand EdwardBurnettTylor, who gave the archaeologyof this traditionits particular slant. In effect, these men asked, If there was natural biological evolution, why might not there be social evolutionas well?Arethere,perhaps,stillexistingin outof-the-wayplacesin theworld,livingsocialfossils?Or,by excavatingthe remainsof peopleswhooncelivedin other partsof the world than in Greece,Rome, or the Bible lands,maywe not findotherfossilsof socialevolution?

The progress to which Albright referred was undeniable and has continued. However, more than he may have realized, it was the result not of the sudden maturation of archeology into a science but rather of the application of the attitudes and techniques of an already scientific archeology to a subject matter previously controlled by the humanities. Biblical archeology has by now developed scientific techniques and specializations of its own, but to some extent its rapid progress has been financed with intellectual capital accumulated in the more value-free, naturalistic archeology that arose after Darwin to investigate pre-historic and non-western remains. A knowledge of the Bible, including the geography and monumental remains of the Holy Land, was once part of culture in the gentlemanly sense. Now, that same knowledge has been appropriated for a less a first As BIBLICALARCHEOLOGIST gentlemanly purpose and bids fair to be integrated into a year completes in its new format, we may be excused if we pause to glance program not of its own making. The question before biblical archeology today backward and forward, asking in just what sense biblical then is whether it will study the cultures of ancient Israel culture constitutes the object of our study. The beginnings and the early Christian church because it believes them to of an answer, and a reminderof our debt to teachers and have an excellence worthy of close understanding and, in be W. F. remarks Albright's sought colleagues, may mutatis mutandis, of propagation into our own time or thirteen years ago on the occasion of G. Ernest Wright's whether it will study them simply as one set of cultures retirementas editor of the journal he had founded. Under the heading "George Ernest Wright and the BIBLICAL among many, pregnant perhaps with some insight into the nature of culture or some feature worthy of ad hoc ARCHAEOLOGIST," Albright wrote: imitation but offering nothing like a comprehensive Withina fewmonthsof receivinghis Ph.D. (June,1937), revelation. Dr. Wright launched a modest quarterly into the Either alternative has its coherence. BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST chooses the former.Those who edit and competitivenaumachy.The first issue had only four pagesof offset,containingtwo shortarticles,one by the write for this quarterlywere, in the main, convinced even writerof theselines,theotherby theeditor,as wellas two before they began their learned investigation, that the short announcements.The first "volume"had only 32 cultures (in the second sense) of ancient Israel and the pagesof offset,but the secondvolumewas partlyprinted early Christian church deserved to make a privileged and ran to 48 pages.After two enlargementsin format, contribution to the culture (in the first sense) of our own in type-face,Vol. accompaniedby markedimprovements day and our own part of the world. Social evolution, they XXIII (1960)increasedin sizeto 132pages. Meanwhile, believe, cannot be progresswithout this contribution. The the pricehad risenfrom50 centsto $1.50.It is still[1963] techniques of scientific archeology may be value-free, but only $2.00 a year, which is remarkablyinexpensive the program of biblical archeology, taken as a whole, is, consideringthe cost of printingand engravingtoday. they believe, value-laden, and unapologetically so. The Now the Schools can look backon a quartercenturyof task of turning new tools to an old purpose without either this extraordinarilyuseful and reliablelittlejournal,as destroying them in the process or allowing them subtly to well as on a steadilygrowingsubscriptionlist.... dictate a new purpose is as difficult as it is unavoidable; WhenDr. Wrightbeganto publishthe BIBLICAL but it is to that purpose that this quarterly is dedicated. over a quarter-centuryago, it was much ARCHAEOLOGIST harderto find suitablecontributorsand contributions than it is today. Biblicalarchaeologywas then a field largely occupied by amateurs without any serious John A. Miles, Jr., who came to BIBLICALARCHEOLOGIST preparationin any scholarlyor scientificarearelevantto a year ago to manage the re-design of the quarterlyand its the subject.Theprogressregisteredin the fieldsince1938 re-direction to a larger audience, leaves after the present hasbeenperfectlyincredible,at leastfromthestandpoint issue to return to his own writing and to his position as of that date. Well-trainedyounger men are now associate editor for religious books at Doubleday and appearingall overtheworld,andwe maybe permittedto Company, Inc. The comments reprintedin"Polemics and cherisha hope thatthisprogresswillcontinue,withoutan Irenics" (see below) are a tribute to Jack's imagination abruptend,in a worldwhichchangesbeforeourveryeyes and perseverance in a difficult task. Ave atque vale. - often for the worse. BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

123

Congratulations on the new format for the Biblical Archeologist. I like it very much. I think that the editorial board is making the proper move in restoring the original purpose of the journal.

POLEMICS & IRENICS BIBLICAL

ARCHEOLOGIST welcomes

correspondencefrom its readers and will make every effort to print those letters, particularly, that bring new evidence or fresh opinions to bear on key issues. The editors reserve the right to edit for brevity and clarity. Three Sargons, Not Two Saul N. Vitkus ("Sargon Unseated," September, 1976) speaks as if there were only two Sargons, Sargon of Agade and Sargon II of Assyria. Actually, there were three, and Sargon II of Assyria of the eighth century B.C. was "second" by reference to an earlier Assyrian monarch, one of the predecessorsof Shamshi-Adad of the 18th century B.c., and not by reference to "history'sfirst emperor," as Vitkus rather grandiloquently chooses to characterize the Akkadian monarch. No doubt, Vitkus had in mind the theory that Sargon II, by styling himself arkuti, the "Latter-day"Sargon, was consciously harking back to Sargon the Great. I myself feel that this is to read too much into the use of an archaic word: royalty under all circumstances is enamored of archaic language. As for Vitkus's attempt to turn Sargon the Great and "Ebrum"of Ebla into Hector and Achilles, the less said the better. Everything hangs on one extremely questionable synchronism, as far as I can tell; and even if that synchronism is verified, we have evidence for Akkadian use of Sumerian signs in the 27th-26th century, earlier than anything even claimed by Matthiae and Pettinato. Vitkus would have us believe that the path of culture ran from Sumer to Ebla and then back into Mesopotamia - a patent absurdity. Sargon the Great may have been the Mesopotamian Charlemagne, but Ebla was surely not his Ireland. Washington, D.C.

Name withheld on request.

Comments on the "New" Biblical Archeologist I should also like to add a complimentary word on the new format of the periodical. Not since I discovered the British-oriented CurrentArchaeology in 1970 have I been so impressed. This kind of innovative effort deserves our genuine congratulations and fullest support. University of Wisconsin, Prof. Clyde Curry Smith River Falls River Falls, Wisconsin Professor of Ancient History

124

Lubbock Christian College Don Shackelford, B.D. Lubbock, Texas Chairman, Biblical Studies I was most impressed by the new format, and purpose, of the BA, and was interested to note that you were seeking potential writers from among the "core audience" to contribute in various ways. Skokie, Illinois

Aryeh Finklestein

I'm impressed with the new format of BA. The layout and photographs are vigorous and appealing. I've only seen the March'76 issue (which came last week); the May '76 issue is awaited eagerly. Garland, Texas

James A. Glasscock

Here is an opportunity to communicate to this generation of "new literates" something of the background of the peoples and places that make archeology a sheer joy to ponder, instead of the "dry, dusty" endeavor it is sometimes thought to be. Hardin-Simmons University Dr. John C. H. Laughlin Division of Religion Abilene, Texas What a wonderful surprise!You have brought the old BA back to life. I can hardly wait for the next issue. Cambridge, Massachusetts

Geri Green

et-Tell Is Not Biblical Ai After reading the article on et-Tell in Volume 39, Number 1 ["Excavating Ai (et-Tell): 1964-1972"], I wonder if et-Tell is the biblical city of Ai. The article makes it clear that et-Tell had a complex Early Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, but it had no Middle Bronze or Late Bronze Age (were there any pottery or faint remains from either of these two periods?). Joshua destroyed a big city by fire. I do not believe that the Early Iron Age settlement without walls is the answer. Pritchardwrites in Gibeon, Wherethe Sun Stood Still (pp. 157-58): "It is at the end of the Late Bronze period, late in the thirteenth century, that the earliest biblical reference to Gibeon must be placed. The Gibeonites emerge first on the biblical scene as the wily deceivers of Joshua, the leader of the conquest by which Israel came into control of certain principal cities of Palestine. Since Gibeon is

DECEMBER 1976

described as a 'great city' at this time, one would expect to find city walls and houses if the tradition preserved in the Book of Joshua is historically trustworthy. Yet traces of this city of the latter part of the Late Bronze period have not come to light in the four seasons of excavations. The two richly furnished tombs of the period discovered on the west side of the mound in 1960would seem to indicate that somewhere on the mound itself there was a permanent settlement. Tombs filled with articles that had been imported from distant lands are not likely to have been those belonging to nomadic tribes which camped on the site. Perhaps in an area not yet excavated-to date we have dug into a fraction of the total area-the remains of the 'great city' of Joshua's day are to be found." Yadin agrees with Pritchard that the time of Joshua's conquests was the Late Bronze and not the Iron Age. Yadin, discussing the chronology in the Lower City writes in his book, Hazor, the Rediscovery of a Great Citadel of the Bible (pp. 35-36): "We can now understand the reasoning behind Garstang'sdating. Having found no Mycenaean pottery, he legitimately came to the conclusion that the occupation of the enclosure came to an end prior to the appearance of the Mycenaean pottery in the area, that is, roughly before 1400 B.C. One can readily imagine our excitement therefore, when we uncovered an abundance of Mycenaean pottery on the floor of the two topmost strata. As we carefully removed the earth, there emerged quantities of the IIIB type (typical of the thirteenth century) on the floors of the top level (IA) and of the IIIA type in the lower stratum (IB). These finds not only indicated that the settlement of IB was the city of notorious Abdi-Tirshi mentioned in the el-Amarna letters, but, even more important, they made it quite clear that the large city of Hazor in the enclosure (which we may, from now on, call the lower city, to distinguish it from the settlement discovered on the tell proper) was destroyed during the thirteenth century B.C., while Mycenaean pottery was still in use. According to Furumark, Mycenaean pottery went out of fashion roughly around 1230 B.C., so the evidence in hand, contrary to Garstang's conclusions, shows that the city was destroyed at 1230 at the latest. As will be explained in due course, we have substantial evidence to indicate that the destruction took place some time in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, say between 1250 and 1230 a.c. This evidence was substantiated in all the other areas of the lower city and is, indeed, among the most important and decisive archaeological testimonies ever uncovered in excavations concerning the date of the conquest by Joshua, and indirectly, of the Exodus itself." In searching for the right stratum of Joshua, both Pritchardand Yadin were searchingfor a substantial Late Bronze Age cities. Et-Tell does not match either requirement. Perhaps Khirbet Haiyan and Khirbet Khudriya should be re-examined to see if they have Middle Bronze Age and Late Bronze Age strata. Hebrew Union College Los Angeles, California

Marvin Arnold Luckerman Docent, Skirball Museum

BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

NEWS FROM THE FIELD

Nine-year Temple Mount Dig Ending. Abraham Rabinovich in the Jerusalem Post, December 14, 1976. "Prof. Binyamin Mazar's archaeological dig on the peripheryof the Temple Mount, one of the most intensive and historically significant excavations ever carried out, is coming to an end after nine years of continuous labour. "A reduced work force will remain on the site until next April to secure walls, finish digging in a few corners and otherwise tidy up. But the main dig under Mazar's direction which shed rich, and sometimes startling, light on 24 centuries of Jerusalem's history, has virtually come to a halt. "A major reason for closing down the current expedition is to give Prof. Mazar and his colleagues a chance to sort out the enormous amount of material which has been gathered and to begin publishing the finds in a seriesof scientific volumes. In an interview ... , Prof. Mazar, now 70, cited two additional factors - the need for an emotional and physical break from the rigors of the long dig and the shortage of money. "The expedition's deputy director, Meir Ben-Dov, said the excavation was also coming to an end because the border which had been set for it - the road skirting the southern wall of the Old City - had been reached. BenDov said the expedition would very much like to continue its dig in the area of the Western Wall plaza. This is unlikely, however, until a government decision on an overall development plan for the plaza. "Mazar stressed that the cessation of the expedition had nothing to do with the condemnations of the dig by UNESCO over the years. He said the one difficulty caused by the UNESCO resolutions was the time he had to devote to journalists visiting the site as a result.

125

"The end of the Mazar expedition does not mean the end of excavations in the area. A committee headed by Yigael Yadin has been set up to determinethe direction of future digs in the Old City area. The committee will also choose the man or men who will lead the excavations. "A likely site for future excavations is the Ophel David's City - south of Mazar's dig. "About 15 per cent of the 22-dunam area dug by Mazar has not been completely excavated in order to leave paths through the site. These areas are expected to be excavated within the next few years. "The paths will be needed while restoration work presently planned for the site is carried out. The Jerusalem Foundation is to incorporate part of the excavations within an archaeological park to run along the southern wall of the Old City. "The Mazar expedition was set up by the Israel Exploration Society and Hebrew University. It began its work in February, 1968. Unlike other archaeological expeditions, whose annual digging season usually lasts for three months or so, Mazar's expedition has worked without a break for almost nine years. "The expedition has cost IL20m. according to Yosef Aviram, director of the Israel Exploration Society. Half the money was furnished by the Government and half by foreign sources, particularlyAmbassador College in California. "For most of its existence, the expedition has employed a 30-man professional staff including 10 archaeologists, architects, pottery restorers and a photographer. It also had 60 salaried manual workers Jews and Arabs - and volunteers who swelled in number from 15 to 20 during most of the year to 300 during the summer. This force has been cut back to 10 staff, 40 workers and about six volunteers. "The Mazar expedition uncovered remnants of Jerusalem'shistory from the First Temple Period (7th-8th century B.C.E.)until the Ottoman period (16th century C.E.). It revealed Christian structuresfrom the Byzantine and Crusader periods and Ommayad palaces from the beginning of the Arab period whose existence had been unknown even to Arab historians. The most impressive finds, however, centered on the magnificent structures and town plan of the Second Temple period. "The preliminary reports emanating from the expedition have given the world the first comprehensive glimpse of the grandeur of ancient Jerusalem."

New Byzantine Finds at Khirbet Ruheibeh. The Jerusalem Post, November 9, 1976. "A Greek burial inscription from the fifth century, tombstones of priests and bishops, a Byzantine dwelling and Nabatean sherds are among the finds in the third season of excavations, just completed, at Rehobot in the central Negev (Khirbet Ruheibeh). "Focus of this year's dig, as in the two previous seasons, was the northwestern church, largest of the four

126

churches in the town, and the unusual undergroundcrypt found beneath its altar, which was completely uncovered this season. Originally panelled in marble, it has a small apse in its eastern wall with a special depression underneath, intendedfor holding the small box in which a saint's bones were buried. The box itself was not found, and it may reasonably be assumed that it was simply taken by the residents when they left the place following the Arab conquest in the 7th century. "Burial inscriptions in Greek on the church floor provide information about the residents of the town, one of the largest and most populous in the Negev highlands starting from the Nabatean era, which reached its peak of flourishing in the Byzantine period when it was situated on the main road to Sinai. The tombstones found were for the most part from graves of priests, two of them apparently bishops. Other inscriptions mention Greek names such as Stephanos, Macedonios and Georgios and clearly Christian names taken from the holy scriptures, such as John, Mary, Jacob and Elias. "The dates found on some of the tombstones are between the years 489-555 C.E. From this it may be concluded that the church was already built in the second half of the fifth century. "Thedig was conducted by the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology and the Israel Exploration Society, with Hebrew University archaeologist Dr. Yoram Tsafrir in charge. Assisting him were students of the Archaeology Institute and volunteers from Israel and abroad."

X-Ray Identification of King Tut's Grandmother. Under a headline privately deplored by at least one New York Times editor, "The Grandmummyof King Tut Is Identified," reporter Boyce Rensberger told (October 14, 1976) of the identification by skull X-ray and hair analysis of the mummy of Queen Tiy, grandmother of Tutankhamen of Egypt. The team that made the identification was headed E. Harris of the University of Michigan who Dr. James by has been X-raying mummies in Cairo for ten years, studying the inheritance of facial and dental features. Queen Tiy was known of, but her mummy had not been located when Dr. Edward F. Wente, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago and one of Harris' collaborators, suggested that one of three unidentified mummies in the tomb of Amenhotep II might be she. Dr. Wente's clue was the fact that the mummy's left arm lay across the chest in a manner reserved for nobility. With the aid of Ibrahim L. Nawawy, head of the Egyptian Museum's King Tut collection, the mummy was relocated and X-rayed. A sample of the mummy's hair was snipped off for comparison with hair found in a locket in Tutankhamen's tomb with an inscription saying that it was Queen Tiy's. Dr. Harris took the X-ray pictures to Ann Arbor where, using a computer that converts the contours of a skull into mathematical formulae, he compared them

DECEMBER 1976

with X-ray pictures from all the other royal mummies. The unidentified mummy fit at only one point in the lineage - between Thuyu, known to have been Queen Tiy's mother, and Tutankhamen himself. The inherited features of her skull could not have come from another ancestor or been passed on to another descendant. With this information in hand, Dr. Harris asked Egyptian authorities for hairs from the locket in King Tut's tomb. Three hairs were flown to Ann Arbor where analysis using a beam of electrons bounced off the hair revealed the relative abundance of all its chemicals. Such analysis is, in effect, a 'chemical fingerprint," since the chemical composition of hair varies greatly from one individual to the next. The chemical fingerprint of the hair in the locket and the hair snipped from the unidentified mummy matched exactly. The resultfor King Tut's grandmummy: a new home in the Cairo Museum where all duly identified royal mummies are housed together.

Of Scrip and Scripture. Writing in the Sunday Times of London, Antony Terry reports (October 31, 1976) the reissuance of the Gutenberg Bible in a 1282-page vellum facsimile edition to sell for ?15,000 or, depending on exchange rates, $15,000-30,000 each. The two German firms producing the facsimile, Von Hase & Koehler of Mainz and Idion of Munich, based their publishing decision on market research that uncovered between twenty and thirty wealthy Gutenberg fanciers throughout the world, but mainly in the USA and West Germany. The total print-run will be 895, most of which will be printed on parchment and sold for a paltry ?2,000 each to doctors and lawyers in West Germany and Switzerland. Original plans to reprintthe Bible using metal type in exactly Gutenberg'smethod have now been abandoned in favor of a new photographic process. The main cost of the deluxe edition will be calfskin. Eight thousand calfskins will be necessary to produce a mere 30 vellum books, and skeptics in the publishing trade believe that the German houses will not be able to produce their deluxe edition for less than $30,000-35,000 per copy. The precedent here is not encouraging since Gutenberg borrowed heavily to produce his original edition and lost not only 185 printed Bibles but his printing works as well when he went bankrupt. On the other hand, from the consumer's point of view, an exact facsimile of a Gutenberg Bible has to be considered a bargain: last August, a single copy of the original edition sold in New York for well over $3 million. A "Sierra Club" in the Holy Land. BIBLICAL

ARCHEOLOGIST

readers

may

be

interested to learn of a relatively new Israeli organization called The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. A promotional leaflet for this nationalistic but BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

transparently good-natured and high-spirited group contains the following description of available tours: One of our mostpopularnationalpastimesis walkingor hiking through the differentregions of the country. AlthoughIsraelis a smallcountry,it containsanunusual varietyof wild-life,landscapesand historicalsites. Our toursleavethemainroadsandpenetrateintolittle-known and relativelyinaccessibleareas. Experiencedguides explainthe naturaland humanhistoryof these regions and point out hiddenplaces of fascinatingbeautyand interest.... On most of our toursguidingis in Hebrew, but many of our membersspeak English and other foreign languagesand someone is usually on hand to explain and translatefor those who don't understand. Theatmosphereisfriendlyandexperiencehasshownthat languageis seldom a problem.The tours we list here usually leave from Tel-Aviv. We travel in specially adaptedtruckswith seats.On tripslongerthanone day, we sleepunderthe stars,in youth hostelsor in S.P.N.I. Field StudyCenters.Roomsusuallyhave4-6 beds. Hot showers are often-but not always--available. Each participantbringshis own well-packedfood. The tours alwaysincludewalking- some more, some less. There follows a -listing of ten different types of tours, including "Driving and Walking Tours," "Hiking Tours," which we later learn "cover difficult terrain and may entail climbing or descending cliffs with the aid of ropes and swimming through deep pools of water," "Special Topic Tours," which center on ecology, archeology, birds, caves, skin-diving, and (apparently) whatever the group thinks of, and various other kinds of tours. For information, one may write to: Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel 4 Hashfela St. Tel Aviv, 66 183 Israel. S.P.N.I. publishes a quarterly,Israel - Land and Nature, copiously illustrated with photographs in color as well as black-and-white, which is included in the $10 annual membership fee. Antiquities in Dayan's Garden. The Jerusalem Post, November 9, 1976. "The Antiquities Department recently recovered two archaeological finds from Moshe Dayan's garden in Zahala, after receiving a tip-off that the objects were there. "This was reported..,. to the Knesset Education Committee ... by Avraham Eitan, head of the Department of Antiquities and Museums at the Education Ministry. "Eitan said that policemen and judges were becoming increasingly aware of the importance of preventing unlawful acquisition of antiquities. He said that in the last 18months some 60 thieves had been caught red-handed stealing objects, had been tried, and had received stiffer punishments than were common in the past."

127

THE

ACOUSTICS AND

CAPACITY

OF IN

NATURAL

CROWD THEATERS

PALESTINE B. COBBEYCRISLER

An amateur archeolgist and a sound engineer put an ingenious hypothesis to an electronic test. The hypothesis: that cities like Shiloh and Shechem became religious capitals in part because they lay in natural theaters and that Jesus made use of another such

theateron the shore of the Lake of Galilee.

In late December, 1974, just prior to Christmas Day, my wife and I were walking over the ruins of Shiloh. It was quiet and we were alone. The sound of a human voice broke in upon us suddenly. Startled, we looked around but could see no one. The voice recurred. In a short while, our mysterious voice became visible as a shepherdcalling to his flock and climbing the valley's gentle slope from the modern village of Turmus Aiya to the more commanding level of ancient Shiloh. What struck us immediately was the clarity of his voice at a distance. We waited until the shepherd passed by before experimenting further. Then, climbing to the spot where the most visible ruins are located, I asked my wife to position herself at the edge of the road directly in front of me but approximately ninety meters away. Keeping my voice at normal level, I asked if she could hear me. She answered, "Perfectly"and her voice was modulated as if for private conversation. Then I tried a loud whisper. She heard it. One fact was obvious. The site had natural acoustical properties at least in the cooler air of that winter climate. As we looked around us, one more fact became clear. The slope of the land was naturally

B. CobbeyCrisleris a trusteeof the DaycroftSchool in Greenwich, Connecticut. This is his first appearance in BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST.

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configured so that it could accommodate easily several thousands of assembled people, all of whom could have faced the presentsite of the ruins and had an unobstructed view of events. Obviously, we had to find out more. A Question Those of us in the twentieth century forget that generations before us had to congregate by the hundreds and thousands to hear the words of civilization's leaders and misleaders without the aid of sound engineers and public address systems. But the need to hear and see collectively was still there. We can all think of biblical incidents with significant audio-visual ingredients in their substructure. Jotham delivered his fable of the trees, for instance, from the top of Mount Gerizim, and lifted up his voice, and cried, and said unto them, "Hearken unto me, ye men of Shechem, that God may hearken unto you." Apparently, the Shechemites in the valley heard every syllable even though Jotham remainedat a safe distance. Adonijah and his political cronies at En Rogel actually heard their political death knell when the supporters of Solomon shouted "God save King Solomon" at Spring Gihon and trumpets blew and pipes piped "so that the earth rent with the sound of them." Christ Jesus had to be heard by thousands on a Galilean hillside while he stood offshore in a boat. With what great audio-visual impact, Jeremiah must have smashed the potter's earthen bottle in the Valley of Hinnom. DECEMBER1976

My question is: could some of these locations have been known and chosen for their audio-visual characteristics rather than being simply fortuitous? Did Jotham already know, for instance, the spot from which his voice could be heard by a wide audience below while he remained secure above? Contrary to the proverbial preference regarding children, people need to be seen and heard. This social and political need existed in ancient times as much as it does today. The Greeks and Romans understood acoustical and visual requirements. Test their ancient theaters today. From the focal point of stage center of the theater in Caesarea Maritima, whispers can be heard in the final row of seats. But it is clearly in Old Testament history that we are faced with the greatest ancient need for mass communication out-of-doors. Whatever the actual number of the people in the historic Exodus, the audiovisual problems must have been Moses' heaviest unrecorded burden. That is, unless he knew the Sinai well and could pre-select those areas with the acoustical properties he needed. Let's not be surprisedif he did, since even modern technicians go to the trouble of checking cavernous convention halls before national political conventions; and sound engineers explore stadiums and arenas in advance of our evangelists or rock and roll bands. Why? To be sure there are no dead spots in the sound space and all the equipment is operable.

The Acoustics of Kadesh-Barnea Was the "thunder of Sinai" aided by the natural acoustics of the area? The sound conditions could easily be tested today. Is there any particular significance that the Hebrew word qol is translated alternately "voice"and "thunder"in the Scriptures?Pent up in that word may be a primitive suggestion of acoustical properties ratherthan an already-erupted theory of volcanic action. Was Kadesh-Barnea selected by Moses just for its water supply? In 1975, on another trip to Israel, my wife and I stood at the traditional site of ancient Israel's encampment and heard our voices easily echo off the parallel mountain ridges that wall this oasis - as well as the chilling click of safety catches releasing from the Uzi machine guns of our accompanying Israeli soldiers. How would the tribal alarm trumpets have sounded in the same defile we wondered? The oasis was a zipper of green in a coat of tan, luxuriant with olives and dates, peaceful and quiet except for a Bedouin girl tending a flock of baby goats. The air, however, seemed alive with potential sound. A jet plane shattered the sound barrier overhead and disappeared. The boom remained and was accentuated down below. Perhaps induced by the soldiers' presence, we felt nature itself was on perpetual alert to amplify the slightest sonic suggestion. It was at Kadesh-barneathat Moses had to replace one generation of loose recalcitrant tribes with a new generation forged into a cohesive, responsive nation. BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

How much mass communication was required?The need is strongly implied in incidents as dramatic as the decision to send twelve spies and to receive their final report. Could the acoustical properties of this particular oasis (close by what may be one of Uzziah's desert fortresses) help to strengthen archeological opinions about the actual site of Kadesh-Barnea? Scholarly Encouragement Before leaving Israel in early January of 1975, we had occasion to visit with Professor Benjamin Mazar in his office near the Temple Mount excavations. At that time, my wife was doing research on utensils and foods of Bible times for a specialty cookbook now published. As we were talking about this subject to Professor Mazar, I mentioned casually and almost apologetically our thoughts on Shiloh. He showed a decided interest, remarkingit was the most important possiblity he'd heard all week. (Of course, it might have been an unusually dull week.) Like Dr. Bob Bull, however, whom we had earlier consulted, he urged us to document quickly the evidence so that the theory could be communicated plausibly. He also stressed that Shechem and Shiloh should be explored and treated together in any article on the subject. On September 2-16, 1976, a further probe into the acoustical possibilities of various sites in Israel and its occupied territories became a reality through generous grants by Zion Research Foundation and The Foundation for Biblical Research of Charlestown, N. H. Robert Koehler, of the latter, had recommended that I contact, for technical assistance, the acoustical firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. Intrigued by the concept, this company designated a representative, Mark Myles, who was willing to accompany me on the trip and bring the acoustical test equipment necessary. Mark and his company donated their time and simply charged for the costs of equipment

My question is: could some of these locations have been known and chosen for their audio-visual characteristics rather than being simply fortuitous? rental. The Foundation paid for this as well as the other costs of the trip. Without such backing and thoughtful assistance, our September project would not have been possible. We are also indebted to David Noel Freedman for encouragement, advice, and the full use of the Albright Institute's resources. Professor Benjamin Mazar, dean of Israeli archeologists, was again supportive and gave us much time. Dr. Avraham Biranof Hebrew Union College dropped everything to help us locate a shofar and provided several helpful insights. Mrs. Pomerantz and Miss Aftergood of the Rockefeller Museum generously let us study the Danish Expeditions' files on Shiloh.

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Shiloh We started our acoustical investigationsin Shiloh. This seemed only appropriate. Here was where the Children of Israel made their first attempt to found a permanent place for worship of the one God. Perhaps every synagogue and church existing today can trace its motivational foundations to this Shiloh ancestry. Shiloh is fascination itself for the Bible historian. What happened there is often only hinted at, but its early Israelite importance from Joshua to the birth of Samuel cannot be overstated. It is clear that the site identified today as ancient Shiloh existed prior to Israelite occupation. Archeological evidence reported by Albright and Glueck shows as much. This has led some to the suggestion that Shiloh, an otherwise unlikely spot for Israel's first religious capital, may have been chosen because of yet undiscoveredcultist precedents at the site. Shalom Paul and William Dever, however, write: "It is not clear why Shiloh was chosen as the site of this important temple. The selection of Jerusalem and most other important sites follows known patterns, but there is no evidence that the early Israelites were attracted to Shiloh by virtue of its prior religious, demographic, administrative, or strategic significance." Then, they propose the general conclusion that "it was selected as a cultic center for the Israelite tribes primarily because of its imposing position, and because it was fairly central in the early area of habitation." These are certainlylogical reasons. They satisfy, at present, because of lack of information and the silence of our historical sources. But, out of that silence, there may yet emergea "still,small voice"- one that remindsus of a point we may have taken for granted. There was,

It was quiet enough at Shiloh to hear a human voice quite distinctly at up to about 500 meters. unequivocally, an acoustical need for leadership to communicate to the full-assembled tribes as well as for these tribes to be seen and heard by the leadership. All present could thus bear witness to the important proceedings that called forth such gatherings. The Test Engaged as we were in acoustical projects, it was interesting for us to note that God's lessons concerning Shiloh were phrased in acoustical terms. At this intensely quiet site, Jeremiah's message rang with stark clarity, especially in the absence of any visible Iron Age ruins. "Go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh" would have an impact on any worshipper, then or now. Shiloh had not listened. The structurewas destroyed. Could it be coincidence, we wondered, that practically every Old Testament reference to Shiloh stresses that there is salvation in listening?

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Fig. 1. MarkMylesof Bolt, Beranekand Newmanrecords the silenceat Shiloh,"thequietestspot he had ever measured." An acoustical study of the site recalls these passages. If today's natural conditions are roughly equivalent to those at the time of Joshua and Samuel, Shiloh would have had a natural listening environment. "It was quiet enough at Shiloh," Mark Myles recorded, "to hear a human voice quite distinctly at up to about 500 meters." In fact, Mark indicated to me it was the quietest spot he had ever measured(see fig. 1). The resultsof these field measurements of the Octave Band Sound Pressure Level are shown in Chart A. Simply put, the "ambient noise" level (interferenceof outside sound) is well below what is considered to be the ideal requirementof the best concert hall. This was the most important acoustical discovery at the site, for we could assume that such a quiet environment existed at the other sites as well as at Shiloh. The lack of modern-day noisemakersand the existence of quiet, attentive listeners would have further enhanced speech communication. Our experiments had to be based on an assumption as to the location of the ancient sanctuary or temple. This requires a brief review of earlier site exploration. The location of the town of Shiloh at Khirbet Seilun has been generally accepted by archeologists. Abundant literary referencesexist as well, and Albright was able to record in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly (1927), while the first Danish expedition was in progress, "In this case, fortunately, archaeology is in perfect accord with other data." DECEMBER1976

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Subsequent discoveries have altered details but have not changed the identification of Shiloh with Seilun. A major remaining mystery, however, is the famous sanctuary's location. Two traditions seem to fuse in the biblical record about this sanctuary. Josh 18:1indicates plainly that the tabernacle was placed there before the final dividing of Canaan into tribal territories. During Samuel's childhood, however, the biblical account strongly suggests not only a more established form of worship, but also of architecture.The term miqdash, for instance, is used to describe the structure (1 Sam 1:7), as it is used to describe Solomon's temple in Jerusalem (1 Kgs 3:1). In their book, Biblical Archaeology, Shalom Paul and William Dever go so far as to say that, "Apartfrom severalunspecified references, the term mikdash (sanctuary)is applied exclusively to two temples, at Shiloh and Jerusalem. .. ." The editors' list of

these references includes, of course, the structure at Shechem.

132

Paul and Dever refer further to the tradition that "holds that the temple at Shiloh was constructed of stone." Eli's seat "by a post" and the fact that Samuel "opened the doors of the house of the Lord" are cited as textual indications of a more permanent construction than a tent or tabernacle (p. 69). No verifiable remains, however, of either the sanctuaryor its location have been found. Millar Burrows in What Mean These Stones? reports the Danish excavators' discovery that, "The foundations of a church of the Byzantine period were found to have the dimensions given for the tabernacle in the Old Testament," but concludes that this was a guess on the part of the builders (1941 edition, p. 202). The head of the early Danish expeditions, H. Kjaer, also was struck by what he found at "Weli Settin, a little southeast of the 'Pilgrims' Church." His report in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly for 1931 (p. 86) continues that Weli Sittin "is still, in spite of its ruinous condition,

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regardedas sacred. Also here we have made soundings, in order to obtain at least a little information as to this much-disputedbuilding. It proved that in the south there is a niche largerthan the Arab mihrab used to be, but still in the main of the same type. Its direction towards Mecca is identical with the direction towards Jerusalem. Probably this feature may afford some explanation of the original character of the building .

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This is no doubt the building which for many Arab, .... was designated by the Pilgrims as Eli's Tomb or centuries Memorial Chapel." Kjaer also exhibits a diagram of the north wall of the Arab ruin, showing a lintel which the current Jewish

The theater of Epidauros, an area of 9,500 square meters, can seat 14,000 people. At the same density, Shiloh could accommodate 10,000 to 20,000 people. Encyclopedia describes (Vol. 14 under "Shiloh") as "perhapsof a synagogue." This lintel has carved upon its surface, "an amphora between two rosettes flanked by two jars" (ibid., p. 1402). Obviously, we had neither the time, desire, nor expertise to enter into the dispute concerning the sanctuary location. We did recognize the possibility, of course, that a thorough acoustical study of the site might offer future archeologists one more dimension in their search for that spot where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Israelitescould have assembled and heard their leaders. For purposes of our study, we located the point at Kjaer's Arab ruin at Weli Sittin. Shlomo Goldschmidt's study of Shiloh had led him to compare the known roads to the site with the sequence of approach recorded in 1 Samuel 4. Here a man of Benjamin, carrying the news of the disaster at Ebenezer/Aphek and the capture of the ark by the Philistines, runs to Shiloh. The Bible account indicates that he reached the town first and then the place where "Eli sat upon a seat by the wayside watching." Goldschmidt, with much justification, proposes the messenger's route to be the ancient road which is roughly equivalent (at its eastern end) to the modern road leading from Turmus Aiya to Seilun. This, if so, would seem to preclude all the sites for the sanctuary considered thus far in favor of the area north of the khirbet or ruins of the town. This way, the messenger would have reached the town first and gone on to Eli's wayside position. This is, of course, completely plausible; but based on our own admittedly limited study, I would preferwhat appears to be the more direct route from Ebenezer/Aphek, through the Lubban valley, north of Jebel Batin and south of Jebel Rahwat. This, according to wadi indications on maps today, would have brought the messenger through the wadi that leads to the base of the tell and then on to the later Byzantine church ruins and

134

then on to Weli Sittin. Perhaps this very discussion will supply furtherincentive for a wider exploration of Shiloh. That someone is doing it was evident from much "nightdigging" obviously going on in the area. Weli Sittin, then, became our assumed sound source. Standing on the height of the present ruins, I read aloud the biblical account of the boy, Samuel, who was one of the exceptional ones who listened at Shiloh. His response to God's fourth call was an obedient repetition of Eli's instructions, "Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth" (1 Sam 3:9). Then in that impressive quiet of Shiloh, the Lord's message came to Samuel's waiting thought, "Behold, I will do a thing in Israel, at which both the ears of every one that heareth it shall tingle" (3:11). Crouched about 100 meters away, near the modern road, Mark Myles recordedmy voice retelling the story of Samuel's receptivity "ere the lamp of God went out in the temple of the Lord" (3:3). The resulting tape is far from perfect. One can hear a jet fly over, the wind and the mechanical noises of the recorder. Despite these obstacles, my voice can be heard distinctly enough (figs. 2-4). Our final experiment in the Shiloh area was to measure the "visual" capacity of this site. Plotting from the Weli Sittin ruin, Mark Myles drew a triangle corresponding roughly to the area within which visual contact with the ruin remained normal and comfortable. Chart B shows Mark's field sketch of the area where we assumed a crowd might have been seated. The "pie-slice" is a section of a circle with a diameter of 150 meters. Using this area, Mark later calculated the maximum number of people that could have gathered there simultaneously. His comments are, as follows: "Note that the theatre at Epidauros (near Delphi in Greece), an area of 9,500 square meters, can seat 14,000 people. Using this proportion, an area of 13,700 square meters could seat about 20,000, and an area of 7,400 square meters could seat about 11,000. Hence, I think we can say that Shiloh could accommodate a number of persons in the range of 10,000 to 20,000." Galilee The gospels of Matthew and Mark provide an interesting acoustical background to a single series of Jesus' parables (see Matthew 13 and Mark 4). Great multitudes crowd to the shore of the Sea of Galilee, causing Jesus to withdraw from them slightly in a boat. They had come to hear him, but was this acoustically possible? The text presupposes that it was. Two years ago, some of my teen-age students put the traditional site to the primitive acoustical - the eyes and ears - test. The wind was quite still that day and the lake barely lapped at the shore. As I read the scriptural account from a rock a few feet out into the water, the students kept moving farther back. Finally, they scrambled up the hill across the modern road. Even there they assured me enthusiastically they could hear. Some scholars feel this outdoor setting was simply an invention of the evangelist or later editor - that it DECEMBER1976

provided him with a convenient environment for the presentation of the parables as an anthology. Our purpose was not to stoke the fires of controversy, but to shed further light on one eminently testable aspect of the biblical account - its presumed acoustics. For us the question was, "Is it possible that somewhere along the shores of Galilee today can be found a spot with measurable acoustical properties, sufficient to meet the gospel requirements?" If so, of course, we were not unaware that the further probability could not be discounted, that the gospel recorder was familiar with such a location. Matthew apparently pinpoints as the site the seashore area near Capernaum. His account opens with Jesus coming "out of the house" (13:1) and closes when "Jesus sent the multitude away, and went into the house . . ." (13:36). This "house" has frequently been identified with the "house of Simon and Andrew" which Mark's gospel locates at Capernaum (1:21,29). Tramping the shoreline past Tabgha and near Tell Hum (now generally accepted as the site of ancient Capernaum), one comes upon a cove with the appearance of a natural amphitheater, sloping steadily upward from the shore to the modern road. It was here my wife and I, several groups from our annual "Bible Outdoors" trip to Israel, and members of the Daycroft School"dig" team at Caesarea had engaged in our earlier primitive acoustical tests. Mark Myles' rough field sketch of this area is shown in Chart C. The site had changed somewhat since our earlier visit. Some of the land had been graded; the road to Capernaum was being widened; the bowl-shaped contours had been affected by the grading and subsequent agricultural plowing. Here was one more reason for the continuing pressure felt by archeologists to examine rapidly many places in the Holy Land before civilization with its bulldozers overturns all outdoor remnants of the Bible into one megalopolite tell, stretching from Dan to Beersheba. First Test on the Lake Our first test involved placing our electronic sound source, weighing about one hundred pounds, including batteries, on a large rock that rises out of the cove's waters roughly ten meters from the center of the arc that composes the present shoreline. This was an attempt to approximate what the gospel describes Jesus as doing: he entered into a ship, and sat in the sea"(Mark 4:1). "... The shrill, sustained tone emitted by the electronic horn drew the curious attention of pedestrians and an occasional army vehicle passing on the road above. As most BIBLICALARCHEOLOGIST readers know, this road is

one of the most heavily-traveled tourist routes in the north. This became particularly evident during our second test. Our object, this time, was for Mark Myles to measure the sound of bursting balloons all the way up the slope, at varying distances, until he reached the presentday road, about one hundred meters away. For this BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

experiment, my assignment was to stand on the rock in the middle of the cove and hold seven red balloons. On a given signal from Mark, I was to puncture them one at a time (figs. 5-6). This sounds simple enough. It probably wouldn't even be noticed in New York's Times Square. But in Galilee? We suddenly discovered that balloons were the way to inflate attention, exactly what we were trying to avoid! Startled onlookers did "double takes," and few who passed our way missed the sight. Out of these spontaneous reactions, however, came a totally unexpected by-product. Some of them turned out to be acoustical tests all by themselves. For example, two cases, involving U. N. cars, are worthy of particular mention. The first car was on its way to Capernaum. The passenger's window was down. Suddenly and quite visibly to me on the rock, the car slowed. I couldn't make

Ourfirst test involved placing our electronic sound source on a large rock that rises out of the cove's waters roughly ten meters from the center of the arc of the shoreline. out the faces from one hundred meters, but the voices were unmistakable. One said, "What's he doing down there?" The other answered, "I don't know! He's just standing there holding some balloons." The second car was on its way from Capernaum. The car did not slow perceptibly and it looked to me like there was only a driver. But there must have been a passenger as well or the outburst I heard would have been even more remarkable. It was in German, a language I do not speak. But, what I heard sounded completely comprehensible. It was: "Ist ein Baloonist!" [Ed.: "Es ist ein Ballonist!"?] All this time, Mark Myles was concealed by the slope from both view and embarrassment,surroundedby his measuring instruments and tape recorder and totally consumed with laughter. It would be no surpriseto either of us if tourists, from many countries of the world who leaned out of the windows of passing buses, are now showing at home a slide of a strange and isolated figure holding balloons on a rock in the middle of the Sea of Galilee- a phenomenon for which they can offer no explanation. Were the tests worth all that exposure? Chart D, in Mark Myles' words, shows "a set of two balloon burst traces - one for the source at the rock at the center of the cove, and the other with the source at the start of the slope. The receiver position for both is at twenty meters." A quick visual contrast suggests that much more sound activity is presentwhen the sound source is at the center of the cove. What does this mean? Mark explains it this way: "The trace for the source at the center of the cove shows distinctly that quite a bit of reverberant energy arrives

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about one hundred milliseconds after the direct sound a phenomenon not seen for the source at the start of the slope. There are clearly two acoustical situations represented here. The question is, which is the best for speech? Early reflected sound enhances speech communication, late reflected sound disturbs it, and acoutics experts argue about what time delay represents the dividing line between the two cases. It is a controversial point. . .." The relevance of this debate to our investigations is that the sound reflection appears in Chart D exactly at this disputed dividing line. Mark goes on to say: "It is true, however, that a steeply-raked audience generally is beneficial for speech. This is why many lecture halls and Greek and Roman amphitheatres have audiences that slope perilously upward. The reason for this is twofold: first, when a person's voice is projected in a line that grazes the audience's heads, the high frequencies are absorbed somewhat by hair, clothing, and, in this case, vegetation. "Second, in the same situation the lower frequencies are absorbed by the volumes in between the

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people. The solution to both of these problems is to speak in a direction that is not grazingthe heads of the audience, or more nearly perpendicularto the plane of the audience. Thus, by sloping the audience and standing away from the base of the slope, one optimizes speech communication. "It is not unlikely that Jesus and other orators of his day were aware of these aspects of speech in an amphitheatre. Thus, it is possible that he chose this particular site and sat in the boat away from the sloping audience for these reasons. There is no denying that speech communication would have been quite good inside this bowl." Crowd Capacity of the Cove Theater Our last effort at this site was an estimate of the "visual" or crowd capacity of the area. Using the same basis for our calculations as at Shiloh, Mark Myles has proposed that 5,000-7,000 people could have assembled on this site and heard clearly a human voice originating from the center of the cove (assuming, of course, no strong interference from wind or weather). These numbers are certainly compatible with the gospel

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description of (from the Greek) "great crowds." Another essential feature of this bowl-like slope is that it would easily permit the speaker to be seen from almost every angle, whether the crowd were standing (as Matthew indicates

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"Suppose the scriptural account occurred exactly as related," we asked ourselves. "What would have been the acoustical impact on a first-century audience, if this were indeed the actual site?" Those were major assumptions and difficult to answer. Perhaps part of the answer was provided for us by the actions of two hikers who paused on the road above us to listen to every word of Jesus' four parables as I read them from Matthew's gospel. "Certainly," I thought to myself, "the original impact would have had to be at least as vivid as that." There was the visual effect, as well. For around us we could see, sown broadcast, the sower's seed. It was springing up even today midst thorns, rocks, on the wayside and on good ground. Here were the wheat mixed with tares and the vivid yellow of mustard flowers harboring their tiny seed. Nature's classroom seemed as admirably preserved as the parables themselves. Whether real or

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editorially borrowed, there could hardly be a more intelligently chosen background for a master-teacher to deliver that parable that deals most with human observing and listening. Twenty-three verses of Matthew's gospel are assigned to Jesus' unique offshore delivery and later private interpretation of the parable of the Sower. Within the brief span of this pericope, the word for "eyes"and/or a form of a verb "to see" occur fourteen times and the word for "ears"and/or a form of the verb "to hear" twenty-one times. Idou, "Look/ See/ Behold," was his opening word, according to Matthew. Mark records the first two words as Akouete, Idou, emphasizing both faculties. But, it is clear that if Jesus employed an acoustical/ visual environment, it would have been simply as a practical teaching tool, one of those necessary means that he used to reach men humanly in order to teach them divinely. Only a surface reader of the gospels would fail to be unmistakably impressed with the imperative demands Jesus made upon his audiences' intuitive as well as perceptive faculties. His real objective was to develop spiritually discriminating listeners. Mark quotes him as saying, "Takeheed what ye hear"(4:24) and Luke records the variation, "Take heed therefore how ye hear."

remembering?That would be an interesting survey. My guess, however, would be the stories, the illustrations, the lessons from life. Jotham had no doubt that the lesson his parable was intended to convey had hit home, because the account states he "ran away, and fled. . ." (9:21). Our aim was not to prove the historical accuracy of the narrative. We simply wanted to know if one could be heard in Shechem from the "top of mount Gerizim." The first challenge was to determine, if possible, where Jotham might have stood. After all, Gerizim has five peaks and the highest one is not the one that immediately commands the Shechem valley floor. Fortunately, Dr. Bull had given me a valuable clue prior to our departure. Showing me the text of the Bible's account of the incident,

iti

Shechem and Mt. Gerizim We left Galilee with two acoustical questions that we hoped could be answered in the heartland of ancient Palestine. There that fortress-city of massebah, temple, terebinth, and well, Shechem, stands astride its valley, as it does so many scripturalevents themselves. Both Robert Bull and Benjamin Mazar had urged that we investigate this site. Its early importance as a point of assembly for Israel's tribes made it an automatic subject for acoustical investigation. The first answer we sought at Shechem focused on a curious incident described in some detail in the ninth chapter of the Book of Judges. Abimelech, in his violent compulsion to be king and despite his father Gideon's earlier rejection of any monarchic designs for himself or his family (8:23), slew sixty-nine of his seventy halfbrothers. Only Jotham, the youngest, escaped. After Abimelech is crowned king of Shechem by the terebinth and massebah, in the area of the "house of Baal-berith," Jotham reappears "in the top of mount Gerizim"and delivers his famous fable of the trees to the men of Shechem in the valley below. Despite this great distance, the record suggests no doubt on Jotham's part that his every word could be heard. In fact, his opening remarkechoes the acoustical language events in the Bible. "Hearken," Jotham says, "unto me, ye men of Shechem, that God may hearken unto you" (9:7). Then follows a literaryjewel and one of the earliest uses of the parable-techniquein the Old Testament. Jotham's use of this lesson-teaching method underscores what may be the Bible's best advice to public speakers. If you want to communicatewith the public en masse, try parables! They served the ancient world as a mnemonic device and still do. What do most people who attend lectures today leave

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DECEMBER1976

he pointed out that the Hebrew word, translated "top" in most English versions, is rosh, which is usually rendered "head." There is one peak (although not the highest) which Dr. Bull describes in BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST,

May, 1975, as "the one which looms immediately above anyone viewing the mountain from Jacob's Well or from the nearby remains of the destroyed city." The mound at the summit of this peak is called by the Arabs, Tell er-Ras. "Ras,"as Dr. Bull explained with studied restraint,"is the Arabic equivalent for rosh." We took as our assumption then that it was at Tell er-Ras, or in its immediate vicinity, that Jotham positioned himself. Although, as Dr. Bull indicates, he would have been visible from Shechem, could he have been heard?As usual, we needed some clearly identifiable and sustained sound source that we could measure. The hiss of our electronic sound transmitter, however penetrating, would have been swallowed up by the surging city noises of modern Nablus, as they swept upward from the valley floor. But, Mark Myles was listening - a valued art in the acoustical business. There was a factory, engaged in outside construction, that was emitting loud, rhythmic and incessant hammering sounds that stood out from all the rest of the Nablus' acoustical mix. This factory noise also happened to be immediately adjacent to Tell Balatah (ancient Shechem) and the ruins of the city's Bronze Age western wall and northwest gate. Within that gate may be seen the temple area and the remains of what has been acceptably identified as the "house of Baal-berith." We took sound level measurements of this syncopated metallic pounding - that would have failed to meet the most liberal noise pollution code in the United States - and proceeded to the "head"of Mt. Gerizim. It took two separate trips to Tell er-Ras to complete the experiment. The second time, Mark Myles went alone, while I waited below in Nablus having our weighty motorcycle batteries recharged. Mark actually had to perform the Tell er-Ras test in reverse. In Jotham's story, the sound source was the mountain. We worked with a sound source at the site of ancient Shechem. A simple calculation based on the loudness of the sound source and the distance the sound had to travel indicated how loud it should have been at the head of the mountain. Our measurements agreed very well with the theory and showed that a human voice in Shechem could have been heard clearly at Tell er-Ras and that the reverse, as well, undoubtedly would have been true. These same measurements suggested the answer to our second question about acoustics in the Mount Gerizim/ Mount Ebal area. The Book of Deuteronomy records the strict instructions given by Moses to those Israelites who would enter the Promised Land (11:29; chapters 27, 28) and the Book of Joshua records that Joshua fulfilled these requirements (8:32 ff.). The assembly of the tribes here must have been an impressive ceremony indeed - kept vivid in memory by eyewitnesses and passed down through oral tradition until it became scripture. The focal point was the midst of the valley, where BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

the Levites stood bearing the ark of the covenant of the Lord. Half of the tribes assembled on the northern shoulder of Mt. Gerizim; the remaining tribes congregated on the southern slope of Mt. Ebal. The blessings, the results of keeping the commandments, were read from or towards the slopes of Mt. Gerizim. The curses, the results of breaking the commandments, were read from or towards the slopes of Mt. Ebal. The simple, stark choice could hardly have been more graphically displayed. Waiting, as in quiet witness, for humanity's choice, was the ark and within it the Decalogue. For me, this story has always ingrained in memory the small but important word IF, for it is reiterated often in the Deuteronomic account. That word seems to symbolize the valley floor of most of our own decisions. It is this very IF which blends with familiar acoustical language in Moses' statement, "If thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God . . all these blessings shall come on thee" (28:1, 2). "If thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God . . all these curses shall come upon thee" (28:15). Could the Children of Israel, assembled between Gerizim and Ebal, have heard all this extensive reading - without missing a word? Our answer to this must be a qualified "yes,"based entirely on our acoustical findings at Tell er-Ras. Why? First, there was the problem of location. This, of course, could be guessed from the text and visually located where Gerizim and Ebal gently stretch toward one another in the valley. On the Gerizim side, however, a prison broods over the spot, making tests rather impractical there. Nablus' ambient noise was the major interfering factor from the neighboring elbow of Ebal. During rare lulls, our ears did pick up individual sounds from the valley quite clearly, however. In a general way, then, we can bear witness to the acoustical properties of the valley of Shechem, guarded by its mountain sentinels. Our investigations on the upper slopes lend strong support to the acoustical presuppositions of the Deuteronomic account regarding the lower slopes.

Spring Gihon and En-rogel

An ageless acoustical problem, communication with the army, had prevented us from traveling from Ain Quseima to Ain Qudeirat (the favored site of Biblical Kadesh-Barnea), so we launched the next day into our final venture. This was to test the acoustical elements in the account (1 Kings 1) of the pretender Adonijah's nearcoronation at En-rogel and the actual coronation of Solomon, about a quarter of a mile away, at Spring Gihon. It is all reported very simply. Adonijah let it be known, "I will be king" and hearing no objection from his father David, who was getting along in years, he proceeded to surround himself with a crown-prince's retinue and trappings. Announcing a huge feast near the spring of Rogel, he invited his brothers, the king's sons, and most of the influential men of Judah. The mail service

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must have been as bad then as now, because somehow Solomon failed to get an invitation! That's when there was sudden action in the palace. Nathan, the prophet, Bathsheba, Solomon's mother, and King David himself made hasty, last-minute arrangements for Solomon's anointing at Gihon. Meanwhile, back at En-rogel, Adonijah was listening to his dinner guests saying to him, between mouthfuls, "God save king Adonijah." Just as the feast was coming to a close, a trumpet (shofar) suddenly sounded from the direction of Gihon; pipes followed, and there was general joyful shouting "so that the earth rent with the sound of them" (1:40). Joab, David's general who had gone over to Adonijah, heard all this commotion, as did everyone at

A calculation based on the loudness of the shofar and the distance its sound had to travel indicated that it should be clearly audible from Spring Gihon to En-rogel. the feast, and asked, "Whereforeis this noise of the city being in an uproar?"The answer came shortly. In fact, the Bible gives us a vivid reminder of what happens when the fragile, tenuous fabric of political power begins to rend. "And all the guests that were with Adonijah were afraid, and rose up, and went every man his way." Our purpose was to test the acoustical claims embodied in this account. This proved to be as difficult as our efforts in the valley of Shechem. The Kidron valley provides the winding link between Rogel and Gihon, the two springs that constituted the original water supply for ancient Jerusalem. This link passes through the center of the modern Arab village of Silwan (Siloam). The hubbub is typical of concentrated population spots in the Middle East. The Shofar Test and Lilliputian Affairs The first idea was to locate a shofar, which we did, in the possession of Dr. Avraham Biran and Hebrew University. Shofar, so good. The second idea was to get Dr. Biran to blow the shofar. Despite his cooperation on other archeological projects, he respectfully declined this invitation. That was when Mark Myles knew that he was elected. His rehearsal was beautiful, but it cost him his first wind. Our tape recordings of what followed would not have won him an audition at the Silwan Opera House, let alone interrupted Adonijah at a meal. Dependent on such a musician, Solomon might never have made it! But, at least, Mark had a measurement of the loudness of a shofar - a critical parameter for the test that followed. As at Shechem, a calculation based on the loudness of the shofar and the distance (675 meters) its sound had to travel indicated that it should be clearly audible from Spring Gihon to En-rogel. Abandoning the shofar, we proceeded to Gihon with our electronic sound source. We knew this would

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have many attendant problems. For example, a fact quickly apparent to every visitor to the Silwan area is that his slightest movement automatically turns Silwan into the small boy capital of the world. These uncanny young natives of Silwan descend upon you from all angles of nowhere and usually simultaneously. They arrive bringing with them the experience of centuries as accomplished entrepreneurs. Here was an obvious problem that could easily mushroom out of control should both Palestinian residents and Israeli army elements become aroused by our loud, sustained electronic sound signal in the heart of an area not exactly known for its freedom from excitement. Our zeal for research, however, encouraged us to press on. We tackled the problem head-on by enlisting the services of two extremely helpful adult villagers, Abed Shehdike Abu Spihe and Ali Al Konbar, one of whom I had known before as a guide through Hezekiah's tunnel. With a few well-chosen words, repeated several times over the course of the day, our friends managed to stem the tide of small boys, who nonetheless kept surging against any and every barrier. Soon our second suspicion was proved well-founded. An apprehensive Israeli soldier, positioned well up the Ophel slope, began calling down chill challenges. Ali, wildly gesturing, engaged in a strident dialogue with him. Although the exchange was somewhat lengthy, it apparently sufficed and we continued with the work of setting up our sound source immediately above the entrance to Spring Gihon. We decided that Ali would remain with Mark Myles as director of lilliputian affairs and that Abed Shehdike would go with me, a quarterof a mile away, to the roof of the building now covering the ancient water source of Rogel. The Arabs call it Be'er Ayub, or the well of Job, for they associate this with the site of Job's trial. Our trial was different, but it had its primitive elements. There was no major local sound source we could hone in on, as we did with the factory at Shechem. My ear would have to be the only instrument to pick up the sound being transmitted by Mark Myles from Spring Gihon. We knew this might not end up as a scientific test, but could not resist doing our best under the circumstances. The circumstances were blaring radios, crying children, diesel buses, trucks, general traffic, school yards in full recess, dogs, goats, sheep, all blending in a cacophony that assaulted the ear with as much variety as the scents of the Old City markets assault the nose. I must admit responsibility, however, for what became the greatest interferenceof all. In a desperate attempt to curb some sound in the immediate neighborhood of the roof on which we were standing, I begged Abed Shehdike to help. He apparently interpreted my request as an invitation to launch a crusade. Small boys were sent scurrying in all directions informing all within earshot they were to stop everything and be quiet. The cure was worse then the disease. Mark Myles was back at Gihon transmitting while I was creating havoc at Rogel. Alas, it seemed no use. My watch indicated the agreed-upon time for sound transmission had passed. So off the roof we

DECEMBER 1976

acoustical trip would be complete without listening to David Noel Freedman. Our first pre-arrangedconference had been held the first day (September 4) in the Golden Saloon (a barber shop!) where eleven-year-old Jonathan Freedman and I had our hair cut. The last meeting (September 15) was in Dr. Freedman's study. We had felt his special encouragement from the beginning. This hardly could be illustrated better than in his greeting to me on the occasion of our last visit. He told me he had another acoustical situation for us to check out and handed me the Bible opened to - 1 Kings, first chapter! The test we had just conducted! This was, I confess, the perfect ending for our trip. We hope that, as in all explorations, our findings have answered some questions in addition to inevitably raising more, and that from this barest of beginnings, acoustical/ visual archeology may eventually occupy a small but important place in the future investigation of ancient sites. Our gratitude goes out to the many scholars who met with us, the Foundations who supported us, and to Daycroft School and Bolt, Beranekand Newman, Inc., who releasedus from our ordinarytasks to look and listen in the Holy Land.

came and drove back through the Kidron Valley to Mark's position which he now seemed to be defending artfully by tape recording the voices of the most urgent of the urchins around him. Comparing notes, we decided that conditions dictated a change from our first test in which Mark had alternated sound and silence. This time we agreed he would sustain the sound for three minutes, after allowing me five to return to our roof outpost. This my Silwan companion and I did. No attempt was made to subdue neighborhood noise, this time. At the synchronized moment, we both heard, penetrating all interference, the unmistakable electronic sound. It was as exciting to us as it must have been fearsome to Adonijah. In fact, this became the last sound we made part of our official record, since research time had run out and we were to leave Israel.

The Golden Saloon We checked at the Albright Institute first, as we had been doing periodically throughout our visit. No

New

Journals

at

Scholars

Press

The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists (BASP) exists to provide a medium both for publication of new texts and for the study of the significance of those already published. It also publishes articles from time to time on inscriptions and subjects in the history of the Greek and Roman world. It is the only journal published in North America and one of the very few in the world devoted to this task. It is now in its fourteenth volume and has in recent years published regular quarterly issues of 40-60 pages each. It is the official organ of the American Society of Papyrologists, the professional organization of papyrologists in North America and an affiliate body of the Association Internationale de Papyrologues. editor Gerald M. Browne, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

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THE

SEARCH

GEZER MACCABEAN

FOR

JOE D. SEGER

Around 140 B.C. Simon Maccabeus took the Seleucid city of

Gezerand establisheda Jewish garrison (1 Maccabees13). With a coin dated to 138 B.C. and a jar handle stamped "of

Simon," a Hebrew Union College expedition may have located the garrison.

After a long and exciting history, Gezer became a Jewish settlement only in the very latest phase of its occupation as a fortified city. Scattered references in the text of I Maccabees make it clear that throughout the late Hellenistic period, while Palestine was under the domination of the Seleucid dynasty, the city was a Syrian outpost. Lying just outside the geographical sphere of Maccabean activity, it served, all through the early years of the Jewish bid for national freedom, as a place of refuge for Syrian armies. In 160 B.c., with the death of Judas Maccabeus, the Seleucid general Bacchides strengthened the city and placed a garrisonthere to consolidate Syrian control (cf. 1 Macc 9:52). Only after another full decade, when the Seleucids had spent themselves in internal intrigue and fighting during the reigns of Demetrius I (162-151 B.c.) and Alexander Balas (151-146 B.c.), was hope in the Maccabean cause revived. At that time, under the leadership of Jonathan Maccabeus, the Jews made strong advances. Finally, in 142B.C.,underthe leadership of Jonathan's brother and successor Simon, the long sought concession of national independence was won from Demetrius II. Riding the crest of victory, Simon

Joe D. Seger was director of the 1972 Hebrew Union College excavations at Tell Gezer.Field archeologists in charge of Field VII operations were Janet MacLennan of the University of Vermont and Sy Gitin of Hebrew Union College, and Karen E. Seger of the HUC Gezer Publications Staff

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moved swiftly to expand the area under his control. His first goal was the taking of the troublesome fortress of Gezer which threatened control of Jaffa and prohibited the establishment of a firm link between Jerusalem and the sea. According to I Macc 13:41, the city capitulated following only a briefsiege and Simon made a triumphant entry. After expelling the inhabitants he resettled the city with "keepers of the law" loyal to him. His son John (called Hyrcanus)was placed in charge of the new Jewish garrison. Identification of the remains of this Maccabean settlement is a problem that has attracted the interest and attention of archeologists and scholars since R. A. S. Macalister's early work at the site. In his "Maccabean Castle" Macalister believed himself to have located the very fortress built to house Simon and John (cf. 1 Macc 13:47). His identification, however, seems to be based less on stratigraphythan on the chance find (in a debris dump) of a Greek graffito later paraphrased by H. D. Lance as "to blazes with Simon's palace." In any event, it is clear in retrospect that Macalister'sstratigraphicacumen was not competent to do justice to the complex archeological and historical data involved. Recent Hebrew Union College work has conclusively shown that a major part of the complex involved is neither Maccabean nor a castle. It is in fact a city gate first built by King Solomon and in use from the 10th century B.C.While there is evidence of a Hellenistic reuse of this gate complex, even here there is still question as to whether there is any clear Maccabean rebuilding involved.

DECEMBER 1976

What then of the Maccabean settlement at Gezer? While it is clear, from the materials published by Macalister, that the site continued to be occupied to the very end of the 2nd century, nowhere can specifically Maccabean remains be stratigraphically isolated on the basis of what he offers. Now, however, with the results of the 1972season of the Hebrew Union College excavations in hand, we have with certainty at least a modest glimpse at this elusive phase of the city's occupation. A major part of the 1972 work was focused in Field VII, a new section located on the mound's south-central plateau, just to the west of the "Maccabean Castle" complex, but in an area untouched by Macalister. Almost as soon as the soil was broken, evidence of late Hellenistic occupation began to appear. Ultimately the floors and foundation walls of a large domestic complex of the 2nd century B.C. were exposed. Three separate living units could be identified. These were located around a central courtyard (fig. 1). Each contained ovens and storage bins, and in one area an elaborate sub-floor drainage system could be traced.

From the fills over the floors of this complex came quantities of Hellenistic pottery, including a number of whole bowls and lamps. With only one exception, the lamps were all of the small folded-over type typical of the late 2nd century (fig. 3). Of special interest was the recovery of several coins. One of these was a silver tetradrachma bearing the name of Demetrius II, along with a dating formula for the year 144 B.C. Of more significance, however, was a bronze drachma found below the floors and walls of one of the living units. It bore the name Antiochus VII (reigned 138-129 B.C.).The evidence provided by these coins thus offers specific support to the ceramic data and confirms beyond doubt a date for the building of this complex in the last half of the 2nd century. It is thus most assuredly part of the Maccabean resettlement of the site. Other finds associated with these remains included a number of stamped jar handles. One, from a jar of the Rhodian type, carried the inscription SIMIOU, i.e., "of Simon," in Greek letters (fig. 2). Among a large collection of metal objects were a good number of bronze pins,

Fig. 1. The Hellenistic(Maccabean)house complex.An overviewfrom the south. (Photo by R. A. Lyons.)

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BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

143

i

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Fig. 2. A Rhodianjar handlewith the stampSIMIOU,"of Simon."(Photo by R. A. Lyons.)

Fig. 3. Hellenisticlampof the "folded-over" type, found in the Hellenistichouse. (Drawingby Susan Moddel.)

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fibulae, and cosmetic rods. From one area came a hoard of iron agriculturalimplements. These had been stored in a shallow sub-floor bin in a room just off the courtyard. Included were ax and adze blades, a hoe, and two large plow points. A number of lead objects were also found. One of these was a plaque, about eleven cm. square, with a raised inscription containing the word A GORANOMOUNTOS, identifying it as an official Greek measure of weight. While the finds included nothing to specifically identify the "keepers of the law" in the cultic sense, we should probably not have expected to find materials of this order in a garrison town such as Gezer obviously was. Influences of Greek culture clearly continue and predominate. In any event, these discoveries in Field VII do provide, for the first time, clear and unequivocal archeological testimony to the Maccabean phase of occupation at the site. From secondary rebuilding of walls and the resurfacing of floors, etc., it is clear that the settlement was maintained until early in the 1st century B.C. After this time, under Roman aegis, occupation moved off the mound proper and into the plains surrounding the site.

H. D. Lance, "Gezerin the Land and in History,"Biblical Archaeologist30.2 (May, 1967),p. 47. W. G. Dever,et al., "FurtherExcavationsat Gezer,1967-1971," Biblical Archaeologist 34.4 (December, 1971), pp. 112f.

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DECEMBER 1976

ST.

PAUL

IN DALMATIA SHIPWRECKED OTTO F. A. MEINARDUS

A quiet local tradition,recordedby pilgrims and touristsas early as the tenth century A.D., identifies M ljet, off the

Dalmatiancoast, as the site of Paul'sshipwreck.Evidencefor its reliabilityis briefly examined.

"Afterwe had escaped,we then learnedthat the island was called Malta. And the nativesshowed us unusual kindness,for they kindled a fire and welcomedus all, becauseit had begun to rain and was cold. Paul had gathereda bundleof sticksandputthemon thefire,when a vipercameout becauseof the heat and fastenedon his hand.Whenthenativessawthe creaturehangingfromhis hand,they said to one another,'No doubt this man is a murderer. Thoughhehasescapedfromthesea,justicehas not allowed him to live.' He, however,shook off the creatureinto the fireand sufferedno harm."Acts 28:1-5; RevisedStandardVersion. The name of the island mentioned in Acts 28:1 is, in Greek, Melite. The identification of Melite with the modern island of Malta (Melite Africana) is of long standing and much reinforced by cult and pilgrimage. This identification has not gone unchallenged, however. In the Adriatic Sea, offDubrovnik (Ragusa) in Dalmatia, lies the island of Mljet (Melite Illyrica), which is, according to Fodor's 1970 Yugoslavia, "the only place in Europe whereyou willfind the mongoose roaming about at liberty. The explanation for this is that long ago these Otto F. A. Meinardusis the author of St. Paul in Ephesusand the Citiesof GalatiaandCyprus,St. Paul in Greece,and other volumesin the LycabettusPress (Athens, Greece)series on the religiousarcheologyof the easternMediterranean. BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

little animals were importedfrom the east to exterminate the snakes with which the island was infested." Despite the snakes and despite the name of the island, neither official norpopular traditionshave developed there to the extent that they have developed at Malta. But this is not necessarily an argument against identifying the island with that of Acts 27-28. In assessing the reliability of an oral tradition, the archeologist must be on guard against exploitation and chicanery even as he remains alert for the survivals of historical truth. In-whatfollows, Otto F. A. Meinardus reports,first, on written ecclesiastical and other public traditions regarding Mljet and, second, on modern oral traditions that he has collectedfirst-hand. Ed. Official Traditions

The earliest known writer who connected the name of the Apostle Paul with the Dalmatian island of Melite (Mljet) was Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, Byzantine Emperor from A.D. 945-959. In his work De Administrando Imperio he speaks (p. 163) about the "pagani" who in the Serbian dialect were the "unbaptized" and who had settled in Dalmatia. These "pagani"in the Roman dialect were referredto as the Arentani, who hold possession of the following islands: The great island Curcra or Coycyra Korcula... "also another island, Meleta or Malozeatae. It was here

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Fig. 1. Mapsshowingthe locationand featuresof the islandof Mjlet.The uppermap locatesthe islandof Mjletoff the coast of Dalmatia.The lowermap (coveringthe area shownin blackon the uppermap) shows the locationof the SaplunaraCove (see fig. 2) and otherfeaturesof the island.

that a viper fixed itself on the finger of St. Paul, who burnt it in the fire." This quotation by the Byzantine Emperor presupposes that at last in the 10thcentury a tradition was current in Constantinople that the Apostle's shipwreck occurredin the Adriatic ratherthan in Melite Africana or Malta. From the 10thcenturyto the beginning of the 18th century we have no literary evidence of the Dalmatian tradition. In 1730 Father Ignazio Georgi, abbot of the 13th-centuryBenedictine Abbey in Veliko Jezero on the island of Mljet, published a famous treatise on St. Paul's shipwreck on the Dalmatian coast, which initiated a lengthy controversy. With his intimate knowledge of the conditions on the island, Father Ignazio was the first theologian to argue convincingly for Melite Illyricaas the site of St. Paul's shipwreck. By the latter part of the 18th century, the local tradition of St. Paul's visit to Mljet was firmly established. In 1788 Thomas Watkins traveled throughout the Dalmatian coast and reported that "I lately visited in the Isle of Croma a monastery founded as I am told by Richard Coeur de Lion, in consequence of a vow for his deliverance from shipwreck, and, yesterday, a party was made for me to the Island of Melita, upon which St. Paul was shipwrecked. An honest monk conducted me to the spot where he landed, still known by the two seas that meet there." Thirty-three years later (1821) John Madox passed through the Dalmatian coast on his visit to the Holy Land and spoke of "Malta being anciently called Melita, but there is also an island in the Adriatic Sea named Melita or Melida, the natives claim the honour of St. Paul's first visit. They insist that the wreck took place on their shore. Scripture informs us certainly that this saint was tossed about for many days and nights in the Sea of Adria." Later in the 19th century the ReverendJohn Mason Neale (1818-1866), Warden of Sackville College, visited the Dalmatian coastline and became one of the foremost British proponents of the Melite Illyrica tradition.

146

The official cult which commemorates St. Paul's shipwreck on the island is of recent origin. There are three Catholic parishes on Mljet; yet, none of the older churches are dedicated to St. Paul, St. Publius, or any event associated with the Apostle's shipwreck, as is the case on Malta. The parish of Govedari has the Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, the parish of Maranovi6i includes the churches of St. Guido (St. Vid), St. Elias, St. Rochus, St. Antony, and the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, and the parish of Babino Polje lists the churches of St. Pancratius, Sts. Andrew and Michael, the Nativity of the Holy Virgin, St. John the Baptist, the Holy Family and the new church of St. Paul. This new church on the main road of Babino Polje, the capital of the island, was built in 1935 and repaired in 1967. In the beginning of the 20th century, Bishop V. Palunko, Titular Bishop of Rodope, could still write that although the island of Mljet did not possess a statue of the Apostle, his involuntary visit to the island is nevertheless remembered by the islanders; now, since 1968, a tall statue of St. Paul stands above the northern altar of the church. The Apostle with a cross in his left hand is shown on the bow of a ship. Popular Traditions Whereas the official traditions on Mljet have not indicated any preference for a particular locality for the shipwreck or any other event associated with the Apostle's visit, the islanders have proposed several sites which they associate with the biblical event. V. Palunko recorded that remains of an ancient wall belonging to a church are situated approximately one mile from Porto coma Meleda, at the east end of the island. An old man had told Father Baldassare Glavic, that this former church was dedicated to the Apostle Paul, a tradition which is also reported by Professor Rudolph Vimer of Zagreb University. According to Professor Vid Vuleti6

"I have learnedfrom my parents and from the other older people of the town, there is an ancient ruin of a church of St. Paul in the vicinity of Korita, but there is nothing written about it." Vukasovib the villagers of Prozura west of Sobra maintain that St. Paul's shipwreck occurred in Porto Chiave. Father Nico Ucovi6, parish priest of Babino Polje, told me that St. Paul's ship was wrecked in the Saplunara Cove, while Mr. Petar Givanovic, one of the elders of Babino Polje, wrote to me "thatas I have learned from my parents and from the other older people of the town, there is an ancient ruin of a church of St. Paul in the vicinity of Korita, but there is nothing written about it. Below the village of Maranovi6inear the small island of Kosmad there is a stone, known as St. Paul's Rock, about one meter in the sea." DECEMBER1976

Fig. 2. Viewsouthward,from the SaplunaraCove to the AdriaticSea.

In the course of my visits to Mljet, I have interviewed many islanders and examined all sites mentioned in the local traditions. I come to the following conclusions: 1. The older residents in the eastern part of Mljet unanimously affirm that St. Paul was shipwrecked on Mljet, though there is no unaniminity about the exact locality. Most of those asked agreed that the shipwreck occurred near the southeastern tip of the island- in or around Saplunara Cove - which is now "military zone." 2. Many islanders are known by the name of the Apostle and are called either Pavlo, Pavla (fem.), Pava (Paola) or Pavica (Paolina). 3. Those residents associated with the tourist industry in the western part of the island around the National Park and the Hotel Melita, the former BenedictineAbbey of Veliko Jezero, are ignorant of the tradition and showed no interest. 4. Neither the Church nor the civic-municipal administration seemed interested in establishing Pauline cult-centers for pilgrimages or to exploit the tradition for touristic purposes. 5. The most likely site that would fit the biblical description of the "Dithalasson," where two seas meet (Acts 27:41), would be east of Saplunara Cove, where two strong currents converge, making navigation difficult. 6. Villagers have spoken to me about all kinds of snakes on Mljet (Acts 28:3-6). 7. The absence of a strong and well-established Pauline tradition on Mljet should not prejudice further inquiries and studies. BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY Angus Acworth. "Where Was St. Paul Shipwrecked?A Reexamination of the Evidence," Journal of Theological Studies, April 1973, 190-93. Fodor's 1970 Yugoslavia. New York, 1970. Ignazio Georgi. Divus Paulus apostolus in mari, quod nunc venetus sinus dicitur, naufragus, et Melitae Dalmatenses insulae post naufragiam hospes, sive de genuino signifactu duorum locorum in Actibus apostolicis, cap. 27:27, cap. 28:1, inspectiones

anticriticae. Venice, 1730. Several refutations followed within a few years of Fr. Ignazio's publication,the best known of whichwereissuedby Count Giovanni Antonio Ciantar,P. Bonaventura Attardi,P. Ubertodi San Gaspare,P. Carlodi San Floreiano,and OnoratoBres. John Madox. Excursions in the Holy Land, Egypt, Nubia and

Syria.Vol. I. London:1834. Otto F. A. Meinardus."Melita Illyrica or Africana:An Examinationof the Site of St. Paul's Shipwreck,"

Ostkirchliche Studien, 32, (1974): 21-36. J. M. Neale. Notes, Ecclesiological and Picturesque, on Dalmatia, Croatia, Istria, etc. London, 1861. V. Palunko. Melita nel naufragio di san Paolo e la isola Meleda in Dalmazia. Studio di geografica biblica. Spalato,

1910. ConstantinusPorphyrogennata. "De administrandoimperio,"

cap. XXXVI, Corpus scriptorum historicorum Byzantinorum. Bonn, 1840. Thomas Watkins. Travelsthrough Swisserland, Italy, Sicily, the Greek Islands, to Constantinople, through part of Greece, Ragusa and the Dalmatian Isles, in 1787,

1788, 1789. Vol. II. London, 1792. Loreto Zammit. St. Paul, Christ'sEnvoy to Malta. Malta, 1960.

147

KADESH

JUDAH'S

BARNEA:

LAST

OUTPOST

CAROL MEYERS

Joshua 15:1-4 assigns Judah the Wilderness of Zin as far south as Kadesh Barnea in the northern Negev. Later, the United Monarchy of David and Solomon expanded southward into the central Negev. After Solomon's death, the new territory was lost. However, the results ofa new survey of the Negev and a surveyor's excavation at Kadesh Barnea suggest that the border city itselfflourished until thefall ofthe Judean Kingdom.

The highlands of the central Negev are the true desert of Palestine, a complex series of intermingling geological formations: high plateaus and sandy valleys, conical hills and lunar craters. Known as the High Negev, this region extends southward from the Beer-shebaBasin, from the Arabah on the east to the springs and wadis leading toward the coast on the west. The High Negev was long considered completely hostile to human habitation. There seemed to be hardly more than a month in winter when even bedouin could graze their flocks among the barren rocks. Yet the Archaeological Survey of the Negev, which began as part of the intense survey of the whole of Israel that was initiated in 1964, has now shown that such an assessment of the High Negev for antiquity is erroneous.1 The Survey, unlike any previous survey work ever attempted, takes each grid on the 1:20,000 map and painstakingly

Dr. Carol Meyers, a frequent contributor to Biblical Archeologist, is just back from a year's research in Israel, where she worked with, among others, Rudolph Cohen of the Department of Antiquities and Museums of the State of Israel. Writing from Duke University, Carol describes herself as "deeply indebted to Rudolph Cohen... for his gracious willingness to provide details of his work at Kadesh Barnea and to share his ideas about the significance of what has been excavated there."

148

explores the entire territory, meter by meter. The project will take many years to complete, but it is clear after twelve years of work that there have been settlements in the central Negev in all periods from the Paleolithic to the Early Arabic. Notable among these evidences of early human habitation is a series of sites dating to the Iron Age. They invariably consist of some sort of fortress surrounding or adjacent to a small settlement. Yohanan Aharoni identified many of these sites in his Negev survey of the late 1950's and attributed their existence and importance to the need to establish control over the road system of the Negev.2 Thus, a line of forts was established which would safeguard the lucrative trade routes with South Arabia and East Africa as well as with the various mining operations in the Arabah and Sinai. Aharoni's work was concentrated upon the road system. Since then and as a result of the Israel Survey, the explorations of Rudolph Cohen, head of the Negev Survey, have given indication that the Iron Age sites provide information not only about trade routes but also about the borders of the Judean kingdom. Cohen is Archaeologist for the Southern District, operating under Israel'sDepartment of Antiquities and Museums. In that capacity he has been able to conduct excavations at some of the sites he discovered on the Survey. Gradually, a sound basis for evaluating the borders of Israelite settlement in the South is being established. DECEMBER

1976

*

IfII..

z-

_

'4

,~0

O

4k~

Fig.1. Viewof Telle Qudeirat,identifiedwithbiblicalKadeshBarnea;theexcavatedareais at theeasternendof thetell.

Central Negev: Abandoned After Tenth Century As a result of the work done to date by Cohen, particularly at the central Negev sites of Khirbet Rahba, Khirbet Haluqim, and Atar Haroa,3 it is now clear that there is a crucial difference in the pattern of Iron Age settlements between the Beer-sheba Basin and the Negev Highlands. Whereas the Beer-sheba Basin remained inhabited throughout the Iron Age, the central Negev was settled only during the period of the United Monarchy, when (especially) King Solomon seems to have followed a deliberate pattern of expansion and of construction of forts. After the 10th century, the southern border of Judah receded: Cohen discovered that all the Iron Age sites in the Central Negev contained remains which dated only to the 10th century. The sites excavated by Cohen have all produced remains of the typical 10th-century "four-room house" associated with Israelite settlements throughout the country. In addition, the remains of two disparate kinds of pottery have been found at these sites within the ashen layer which marked the termination of the settlements:4 (1) wheel-made vessels, including cooking-pots, juglets, andjars similarto 10th-centurypottery found throughout BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

the country; and (2) hand-made pottery, sometimes known as Negev ware, which consists of a few, relatively simple forms found only at sites in the central and southern Negev. While the wheel-made pottery is quite well known, the origin and development of the handmade vessels are problematic. Kadesh Barnea: Tenth Century and Later Therefore, in order to investigate the matter of hand-made Negev pottery as well as to clarify the western boundary of the central Negev and the Judean hold on it, Cohen turned to the site of Kadesh Barnea, where he fielded an excavation in January, 1976, on behalf of the Department of Antiquities and Museums of Israel. Kadesh Barnea, known also as Tell e Qudeirat after the spring Ein el Qudeirat, is located at the largest oasis in northern Sinai, a lush green valley that has attracted travelers and a variety of permanent and semipermanent residents for millennia. The tell itself (see fig. 1), surmounted by a large (60 x 41 m.), rectangular,eighttowered fortress, was first delineated and planned at the beginning of this century by Woolley and Lawrence.5 Later excavations were carried out by Moshe Dothan. In 1956, Dothan identified three periods of occupation: a

149

pre-fortress period, containing only hand-made pottery which he dated to the 10th century; the fortress itself with pottery from a very long time-span - the 9th to the 7th centuries; and a post-fortress period of scattered Persian remains.6 Cohen was curious about a number of things. To begin with, the existence of a corpus of 10th-century hand-made pottery without accompanying wheel-made pottery seemed strange. After he examined Dothan's materials, it began to seem that, in comparison with the materials found at the Negev sites he had just excavated, the pre-fortresshand-made pottery at Kadesh Barneawas somewhat different. The shapes seemed more or less the same as those from the central Negev corpus; but the texture and general feeling was somehow not quite the same. Cohen wanted to see if this pre-fortress pottery really belonged to the 10th century. If so, were there structures to go with it? If not, could it perhaps be earlier than the 10th century? In addition, the existence of the fortress in its eight-tower form without alterations for nearly three centuries seemed unusual. Indeed, it was without parallel in Negev sites of the Iron Age. Perhaps there was more to the history of the place than had been realized. Dothan had thought that the casemate walls of the fortress had been built almost on the wadi floor, with a huge glacis having been constructed to increase the fort's impregnability. This would have made it almost a Khirbeh, or ruin, rather than a true tell. Since Dothan's tentative conclusions had been based on relatively few soundings, Cohen felt that a wider exposure of the remains might clarify the history of the defenses. Finally, Dothan's work had left unresolved the matter of the location of the gate or entrance to the fortress. Cohen's expedition would also address itself to that problem.

Fig. 2. Silo foundoutsidethefortresswallsat thesoutheast corner.

AR Al

MANIX ;R,

150

W,1777. ........ A:

1976 Excavations The 1976 excavations at Kadesh Barnea were carried out along the eastern end of the tell, where fifteen squares (5m. x 5m.) were laid out from north to south. This area of excavation would include part of the casemate wall of the fortress, the central tower of the eastern end, part of the courtyard area, and perhaps the area of the gate, since Dothan had noted at the

The central Negev was settled only during the United Monarchy, when King Solomon followed a deliberate pattern of expansion and construction of forts.

southeastern perimeter a pavement outside the walls which he suspected might be part of an entryway. Cohen also chose the eastern portion of the site because the courtyard area at this point is much higher than at the western end, evidently signaling a greater build-up of debris. The results of Cohen's work, after one season, show that Kadesh Barnea is indeed different from the typical Iron Age settlements in the Negev. Already three series of ruins have been identified and dated, not including the uppermost Persian remains. 1. The fortress with eight towers and casemate walls dates to the 7th-6th centuries B.C.E. The pavement outside the walls at the southeast corner proved not to lead to a gate; rather, a well-built silo was found at this point (fig. 2). 2. Below this fortress is another fortress with 4 m.-wide walls dating to the 8th-7th centuries B.C.E.This structure is very similar to the fortresses with 4 m.-wide walls known from the northern Negev tells at Beer-sheba, Arad, and Aroer. 3. Below the earlier fortress are 10th-century remains. So far these have been recovered only in one pit, and it cannot yet be ascertainedwhether these remains are also part of a fortress. Only further excavation will determine this. But in general, the depth of debris has been surprisingthe deepest trench has already uncovered 6 m. of debris, and virgin soil has yet to be reached. The pottery uncovered in the excavations includes wheel-made pottery typical of Palestinian pottery in the 8th-7th and 7th-6th centuries B.C.E. Hand-made pottery, in quantities enormous by comparison with other Negev sites, was also found. However, by contrast with other sites where only supposedly 10th-century Negev ware was recovered, Kadesh Barnea has prGduced stratified hand-made pottery from the uppermost to the lowest levels, that is, from the 6th back to the 10th century. The Negev pottery clearly has a long range; it may even go back earlier than the 10th century.7 Furthermore, it is not exactly the same throughout. A

DECEMBER 1976

k

The sequence of Negev pottery obtained from Kadesh Barnea provides important clues concerning the history of this pottery and also offers tantalizing new information for the old question of the ethnic identity of the producers of any given ceramic corpus. Nelson Glueck, after first discovering this pottery at Tell elKheleifeh, identified it as the handiwork of the semisedentary inhabitants of the Negev, the Kenites, Rechabites, Calebites, and Yerahmeelites.8 Aharoni attributedit to the nomadic potters of the Negev who used it mainly for domestic purposes.9 Rothenberg holds that this pottery is Amalekite.10 Finally, Cohen would generalize upon Glueck's impressions and identify the pottery with Israelite-relatedgroups and ultimately with the Israelites themselves. However, it is obvious that Tell Kadesh Barnea has not been exhausted as a source of information on this subject. Earlier stratified Negev pottery may yet be found; and Kadesh Barnea --judging from the quantities of material- may prove to be a center of its manufacture and thus a key to understanding its patterns of use and dissemination inthe southern areas of ancient Palestine.

Fig. 3. One of four Hebrew ostraca discoveredin the fortressat KadeshBarnea.

development over the centuries can be recognized, with some shapes remaining more or less constant and with others increasingly influenced by contemporary wheelmade types. Ostraca Finds In addition to the pottery, the small finds include four ostraca (fig. 3), which are presently being least at deciphered by Professor Naveh of the Hebrew University. One of these seems to be part of an abecedary, written in an excellent script. Another contains three lines of writing, the contents of which are not yet clear. A third is an ostracon from the latest stratum, very similar to one from the Arad fortress, bearing at least ten lines of hieratic writing. Thus, these recent excavations have shown that, while Kadesh Barnea is topographically located at the western extremity of the Negev Highlands, it does not share the same history as the Iron Age settlements of that region. Habitation for the most part ceased in the central Negev during the Divided Monarchy, but Kadesh Barnea remained a thriving settlement until the end of the Judean kingdom. In other words, while the southern state could not, for whatever reasons, sustain its Negev territory as spelled out in Josh 15:1-4, the Sinai border continued to be maintained, with Judea controlling northern Sinai as far as Kadesh Barnea. Cohen believes that this site must be seen as a border post as well as a highway defense. The fact that it was settled from the 10thcentury, if not earlier, until the 6th century, makes it more akin to the big tells of the northernNegev than to the fortress ruins of the central Negev. BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

'Thisis reportedin"TheArchaeologicalSurveyin Israel, Notes and News," Israel Exploration Journal 15 (1965): 263-64.

2Y. Aharoni, "Forerunnersof the Limes: Iron Age Fortresses in the Negev," Israel Exploration Journal 17 (1967):

1-12. 3R. Cohen, "Notes and News," Israel Exploration Journal25 (1975):171-72;"Excavationsat KhirbetHaluqim," cAtiqot (EnglishSeries) 11 (1976,forthcoming):34-50;"Atar Haroca,"cAtiqot (HebrewSeries)6 (1970):6-24. 4Perhapsa resultof Shishak'scampaignin Palestine.Cf. B. Mazar,"TheCampaignof PharaohShishakto Palestine," Vetus Testamentum Supplement 4 (1957): 57-66.

5Woolleyand Lawrencewerethe firstto identifyTell e of Zin,"Palestine Qudeiratas KadeshBarnea.Cf. "Wilderness Annual III 69-71. This Fund (1914-15): Exploration identificationhas been acceptedwidelyever since. The name KadeshBarneamayhaveappliedto thewholeQuseimadistrict, of whichanother,smallerspring,EinQedeis,was also a part. 6M. Dothan, "TheFortressat Kadesh-Barnea," Israel Exploration Journal 15 (1965): 134-51. 7B. Rothenberg, Timna, Valley of the Biblical Copper

Mines,London:Thames&Hudson,1972,pp. 153-54,mayhave it as earlyas the 12thor 1Ith centuries;and a sherdhas been found in a clear 1Ith-centurycontext at Tell Mai6?;so Y. Aharoni, V. Fritz, and A. Kempinski,"Vorberichttiberdie

Ausgrabungen auf der kjirbetel-Mfd? (ThiMdh6h),"Zeitschrift der deutschen Paldstina- Vereins89 (1973): 202, p1. 22:A.

'Nelson Glueck,"TheThirdSeason of Excavationsat Tell el-Kheleifeh," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 79 (1946): 17-18. 9"TheIron Age Pottery of the Timnac and CAmran Area," Palestine Exploration Quarterly 94 (1962): 66.

'0Rothenberg,Timna,p. 117.

151

"CHANGE IN

ALL

DECAY

AND

AROUND

I

SEE":

AND COVENANT, CONQUEST, THE

TENTH

GENERATION

GEORGEE. MENDENHALL

This quotation from an early 19th-centuryhymn is a remarkably apt summary of our present knowledge of the course of ancient history. It contrasts most sharply to the 19th-centuryidea of the "unchangingOrient,"and in this Bicentennial year of the existence of the U.S.A. it is most appropriate if not urgent to take a new look at the past history of humanity. Here we shall deal only with ancient Near Eastern history as we now know it from written documents and from archeological excavations. Nevertheless, the conclusions seem to apply to other periods of human history as well, including perhaps our own. For at least fifty years now, archeologists have subdivided the history of Palestine into at least twelve periods, from Early Bronze I (we shall not deal with the Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures) to the Persian Empire. Roughly, these subdivisions average about 200 to 250 years each, and are necessitated by the fact that cultural changes had taken place to such an extent that a new "label"was requiredfor the various layers of ancient ruin mounds. But so far as I am aware, there has been

George E. Mendenhall is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His

recent work, The Tenth Generation:Origins of the Biblical Tradition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), is viewed as one of the most stimulating books dealing with the interpretation ofbiblical history and its relationship to modern society to be published in some time.

152

little or no discussion of the historical or cultural implications of this fact of life. The classifications of strata generally accepted by all archeologists from the Early Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age are based upon observed changes in artifacts from household pottery to works of art. But there is also a fairly high degree of correlation between cultural change revealed by excavated artifacts and linguistic change revealed by excavated inscriptions. To give only a few examples, the Egyptian of the Early Bronze pyramid age is quite different from that of the Middle Bronze Middle Empire. Old Akkadian of the Early Bronze Age is radically different from the Middle Bronze, Old Babylonian, or Old Assyrian. As culture changes, so language changes, but there has been little sensitivity to this fact, particularly in the field of biblical studies and Palestinian archeology. The Tenth Generation Hypothesis Partly for the reasons described above I have developed the thesis in The Tenth Generation that very few specific socio-political organizations of the ancient world survived for more than 250 to 300 years without undergoing radical change, if not total destruction. To point out these historical facts is useful, if only to counter the tendency on the part of specialists in various ancient cultures to ignore what I would term "macro-historical" studies and comparative history as well. I find it most intriguing, if not uncanny, that specialists in the archeology of the Aegean regions come DECEMBER1976

up with a chronological classification (though of course they use different terminology) that is very similar, if not identical, to that in common use by specialists in Near Eastern archeology. The implications of this "macrohistorical" fact have (to my knowledge) never been adequately explored. I would suggest that the ancient world, like our own, was much more interdependentthan we realize and that cultural trends in one region were imitated in other regions - and had similar consequences, even though we may not at present have archeological evidence for such interrelationships, until relatively late periods (especially the Late Bronze Age). The archeological and historical evidence now available demonstrates beyond doubt that cultural and political discontinuity did take place roughly every ten

Veryfew specific socio-political organizations of the ancient world survived for more than 250 to 300 years without undergoing radical change, if not total destruction. generations in the ancient world. In most cases those discontinuities must have been very traumatic for those people who lived through them, as the very common ash layers of burned cities attest. Yet much more important, especially to us today, is the question: "What made those archeologically attested events happen?"In other words, the traditional academic concern for the recording of facts and artifacts has largely ignored the far more important question of the dynamics of history. Unfortunately, in ancient as well as modern times, when the roof is falling in a burning building, persons do not usually sit down to write books about the event. The "tenthgeneration" effect most often attested to by the ash layers that separate different cultural levels of the ancient ruin mounds is therefore largely shrouded in mystery. This is particularlytrue of the most dramatic destructions and discontinuities that attended the ends of the Early Bronze Age and the Late Bronze Age respectively (in round numbers ca. 2200 B.C.and 1200 B.C.). Among the ancient Greek historians there was a sensitivity to the fact that cultural change had taken place, and even today in popular literature the "golden age" is contrasted to the "iron age," following the ideas of those Greek historians. The evidence accumulating from modern competent excavations makes those antique theories about "historicalcycles" or the "cyclicaltheory of history"just as irrelevantto modern research as the 19thcentury ideas about "Social Darwinism" and inevitable "progress."Similarly, modern genetic theory has little in common with 19th-century ideas about "evolution." Biblical archeology has a much greater task to perform than in the past generation. Granted, there is still a very large number of important ancient sites and cities that have not been correlated with place names in the Hebrew Bible or ancient texts. There are also many BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

ancient sites still to be excavated. There are many ceramic and absolute chronologies still to be worked out or even to be begun. There are no doubt thousands of inscriptions to be discovered and translated, as well as unknown scripts to be deciphered. Yet, in some future archeologists' ideal world in which all these technical academic tasks had been completed, we should still have to ask the vulgar question, "So what?" Unfortunately, perhaps under the pressures of academic competition, archeologists seem increasingly unable even to comprehend the vulgar question, much less able to cope with it. Technology in archeology seems increasingly to be an end in itself, and the ultimately important questions as to what archeology tells us about the real life of human beings of the past is often ignored as unworthy the attention of the technically trained specialist. Above all, it seems that the constant of cultural change upon which the archeological chronology must be based is regardedas a subject that must either be ignored or answered on the basis of most naive assumptions or theories that often ignore the fact that culturalchange is a product of humanity. Cultural change is a result of choices made by human beings, of course, in interaction with their natural environment. But there seems to be little sensitivity to the fact that such change is produced by human beings in interaction with their social and ideological environment as well, probably, as our evidence now extends, much more frequently. To put it in currentlypopular language, the pollution of the natural environment has ultimate consequences, often, that are highly undesirable. That fact has been widely publicized, and has led to much litigation and legislation. But the fact that the pollution of the social and ideological environment, both internally and externally, may have undesirable and unexpected results to the polluters seems to have no recognition in the modern world. The sad fact is that both kinds of pollution can be subsumed under the excuse: "It seemed like a good idea at that time," that is, to those who made the decision. Perhaps the paradigm of this attitude was the decision of King Rehoboam at Shechem. But what constitutes a pollution of the social and ideological environment? In general, and theoretically, it is to be defined as acts that arouse rage and anger on the part of persons other than the actor. (On this, see a forthcoming dissertation by Frank Spina on "social rage.") Just before and for a time after the abrupt emergence of the Twelve Tribe system (I won't quibble about the number of tribes, since tribal organizations are notoriously unstable), we have abundant evidence that the concern for obtaining and exercising power amounted almost to a pathological obsession in the eastern Mediterranean world. One could say, following descriptions of later Rome, that war and politics were the only respectable occupations for anyone who claimed high social status. Further, according to W. Lambert, we know very little about most of the populations of the ancient world except for the elite 20% at the top who produced the written documents from which we reconstruct history.

153

The Inevitability of the Religious Hypothesis If, therefore, there very suddenly emerged a new and very large community at the transition from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Ages in Palestine, which no one questions, an understanding of that community and its social and ideological characteristicsabsolutely cannot be unrelated to what had been going on before in that area. This conclusion is most strongly reinforced by evidence from the history of language and perhapsfrom the history of writing. It seems to me demonstrated beyond question by the social and ideological characteristics of early Israel,for those characteristicswere a systematic rejection of most cultural traits characteristic of the Late Bronze Age city states. The Tenth Generationthesis posits that the system of empires and city-states of the Late Bronze Age had reached what may be termed a "criticalmass" state. The complex of economic productivity, of social organization and stratification, and of the ideologies (always

Yet, in some future archeologists' ideal world, in which all these technical academic tasks had been completed, we should still have to ask the vulgar question, "So what?" "religious") that were supposed to hold together and assure the smooth functioning of the total system, broke down entirely. There certainly was migration, especially from North to South and from East to West, as the Philistines, other "sea-peoples," and also certainly the Etruscans in Italy attest. There was social chaos and turbulence lasting for a century in all of the eastern Mediterraneanworld, though not necessarily at the same time. (Assyria, for example, seems to have delayed the process for a generation or two, being more remote from the center of the historical process.) The result was almost universal destruction by violence of the urban centers, though recent archeological evidence has revealed at least three that escaped destruction during the final phases of the Late Bronze Age. Society everywhere, then, became fragmented, poor, and crude in comparison with the preceding epoch. To be sure, attempts were made in many of the old urban centers to continue the traditions of a more "glorious"past, but such kinglets, or perhaps what anthropologists term "primitive chiefdoms," were a pathetic shadow of what had been, relatively speaking, fairly formidable city-state power structures. According to Joshua 12-13such kinglets were removed in the process of the formation of the Israelite federation. It is particularly significant that no narrative of battle in the Bible deals with the very heartland of the Federation: Ephraim and Manasseh. (Shechem's destruction was an aftermath and could well be a paradigm of what was happening in the eastern Mediterraneana century or so earlier- the struggle for power.) It is not possible here to detail the evidence for a more-or-less simultaneous disintegration of the

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economic, social, and ideological order of the Late Bronze Age. It is necessary to emphasize that these three aspects of any culture are inevitably interrelated; if one breaks down the others are likely also to suffer. Furthermore, the process may begin in one particular region, but is rarely if ever confined to it. What Breasted called (wrongly) "The First International Period" produced evidently a similarity in cultural structures(not necessarilyforms), and eventually they all reached that "critical mass" stage more or less simultaneously with similar results. The social, political, and ideological structureswere no longer able to cope with the problems facing them, and the result was chaos. If this sounds like a description of many parts of the modern world, it is no coincidence. This universal breakdown of cultural structures, resulting in violent destruction of cities, was a phenomenon of the Late Bronze Age in the area with which we are most concerned - Palestine. The older school of "biblicalarcheology"identified that destruction with the so-called "conquest of Palestine" by the Israelite tribes, and consequently the biblical chronology was tied to the dating of those destruction levels. As the second major (i.e., the German) school of biblical studies has constantly and rightly emphasized, there is no evidence that those Late Bronze Age destruction levels had anything at all to do with the so-called Israelite conquest. What that social chaos did bring about was an almost incalculable weakening of all political structures,and this preparedthe way for a new society based upon a radically new ideology. The formation of the Twelve Tribe Federation was, therefore, a phenomenon that took place after those destructions, at the very end of the Late Bronze Age or the beginning of the Iron Age, in round numbers, between 1225 and 1175 B.C.,possibly even later - but not earlier. The warfare that did undoubtedly take place at the time of the formation of the Israelite federation had nothing to do with siege and burning of cities, with the exception of Ai, which is described in such precise detail that it could not have been derived from any source other than historical reality. The same is true of the narrative concerning the defeat and execution of the coalition of kings who attacked Gibeon, but the defeat of a coalition has nothing necessarily to do with the destruction of cities. Quite the contrary, the biblical traditions insist very strongly that most of the old Canaanite urban power centers continued to exist (and remain pagan) until the reign of David. Archeological evidence gives us some controls, as well as enigmas, in respect to those biblical traditions, which simply underlines the fact that biblical traditions must be understood within the social, political, and ideological context in which they were created in the forms that we now have. The "wars"can hardly have been much more than guerilla-type attacks upon very small professional military units. Every indication points to the conclusion that all social or political organizations in Palestine or Transjordan during the earliest phase of the Iron Age were very small. As an example, I can cite the fact that DECEMBER1976

the three most competent ceramic specialists in the Transjordanian tradition agree that at present we have not a single clear example of early Iron I sherds between the Wadi Mojib and the Jordan-Saudi border. This can be explained in two ways: first, and probably the most popular, the idea that the population of southern Transjordan then was nomadic and therefore did not use pottery. This theory underliesthe old 19th-centuryidea of Israelite tribal infiltration into Palestine proper. Much more probable is the fact that the extremely superficial research in the pre-Roman periods of Transjordanian archeology to date simply have not been able to yield the evidence for the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age that we need in order to make any correlation between the biblical traditions and the archeological evidence. The prematureurge to identify archeological data with biblical tradition seems irresistible and now also absurd. The "biblicalarcheology" school and the German school cancel each other out, and there has been an impasse in biblical studies for at least the past thirty years. Curiously enough, the way out from both of these blind alleys may lie in that aspect of biblical tradition that both virtually ignored in attempting to account for the historical events. It now seems belated but necessary to emphasize that which the earliest biblical traditions, especially in the old poetry of the Pentateuch, emphasized as most characteristic and essential to the formation and existence of ancient Israel - the religious structure of its faith - in our attempts to reconstruct the history, or interpretarcheological evidence. There has almost always been a systematic tendency to separate "biblical theology," archeology, and history into isolated watertight compartments, largely because of the accidents of modern academic organization and curricula. I am arguing here that early Israel was an ideological movement, and the other two can be understood only as function of the new theology in social organization and economic structure. Our problem is the fact that ideological systems as a basis for social organization of a large scale are too rare in human history to be understood readily. To this we may add the fact that the typical Western urban scholar is very poorly equipped to understand sources that stem from a pre-Hellenistic Asian village society. The "culture shock" that the State Department warns of when personnel are assigned to non-Western posts is something of which very few biblical scholars are even aware. The problem is magnified immensely because biblical scholarship since the 19th century has been obsessed with the "bedouin mirage" and racial theories. Freedman (1976: 3) is emphatically right in stating that ". . . any defendible (sic!) hypothesis will have to be complex enough to accomodate (sic!) disparate data from many sources and also plausible enough to make sense to the unprejudiced observer." It seems to me that there is a super-abundance of evidence already at hand to indicate that the ancient Twelve Tribe system of Israel was founded upon a new religious way of thought and upon a covenant tradition that furnished a common basis of trust

BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

in social life. In the first place, biblical tradition knows of only two migrations toward the end of the Late Bronze Age: that of Jacob (a good Middle Bronze Age Amorite name that occurs also in the "Hyksos dynasty" of Egypt) and the Exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. The various associations of not only Jacob, but also the Transjordanian tribe of Machir, with the Arameans points also to a migration from northern or northeastern Syria toward the end of the Late Bronze Age. The old 19th-century hypothesis of infiltration of barbarian nomads is now absurd, for there is no conceivable geographical region from which they could have come. The German school is quite correct in maintaining that the Twelve Tribe federation was formed in Palestine itself. As Albright pointed out years ago, many of those tribal names are very archaic Canaanite, some of them actually geographical terms originally. The old idea that a tribal form of organization proves a nomadic origin is now completely wrong-headed, for evidence from Byblos via Athens to Rome as well as modern anthropological observations indicate that some form of tribal organization is just as characteristic of urban and village populations as it is of nomads. Though there has been much dispute about the tribal boundary lines of ancient Israel, the fact that the traditions place so much emphasis upon them fits perfectlywith the fact that tribes tend to be territorially based. Finally, actual kinship is neither the basis nor origin of a tribe. It is for this reason that tribes almost universally have a "common ancestor" who may or may not be an actual historic personage. It is not historical facts that were important to ancient peoples: it was the social function of the "common ancestor" that was important, in transferring the close ties of brotherhood from the actual kinship lineage to the larger tribal organization. Many, if not most, of the "patriarchal narratives" should be placed, therefore, into the same category as the "livesof the Saints," which are common to Christianity, Islam, and even Buddhism. It takes a much more subtle and skillful historical sense than has usually been exhibited in biblical scholarship to disentangle authentic historical facts from the folkloristic elaborations that are the result of the tribal organization, not the historical cause. A Transformation From Within The major question, upon which all else depends, is what were the sources of that population of the Twelve Tribes that Albright years ago estimated at approximately a quarter million, only a generation or two after the time of Moses. The only plausible hypothesis available is that those tribes constituted a new social organization founded upon a new religious ideology that stemmed from the little band under the leadership of Moses. The traumatic century 1250-1150 B.C. prepared the way; the old Bronze Age political ideologies and the inevitable struggle for power had proven to be morally and politically bankrupt. The Mosaic revolution offered an alternative to village populations that was immensely

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attractive to that productive part of the population of Palestine upon which the urban power centers were necessarily parasitic. At most, the city states furnished only a modicum of personal security to the village peasants and shepherds. With the destruction, weakening, and fragmentation of the older power structures, even the minimal function of security for village populations could not be carried out. Therefore, the village populations were unified, in all their diversity, under the rule of God; except for the brief episode of the Midianite raids, the only groups from whom they needed protection were the petty kings themselves. There are multiple lines of evidence that point inevitably to the conclusion that the population of the Twelve Tribes were very predominantly native Palestinians who had converted to monotheism under the covenant with Yahweh: 1. Most powerful is the evidence of language. Biblical Hebrew is from its earliest sources a collection of materials from various local dialects, all of which are Canaanite of the Iron Age. The breakdown of the Bronze Age phonetic and grammatical system must have proceeded very rapidly with the breakdown of culture, but the same process (or very similar) took place in Hebrew as it did at the same time in Phoenician; Aramaic went its own way, of course. I strongly suspect that the linguistic breakdown had already been a trait of the colloquial speech of Late Bronze Age cities, characterized as they were by enormous diversity of linguistic backgrounds. Note the fact that throughout the history of language, the language of the elite and especially professional scribes, almost always contrasts to colloquial speech, and especially that of the more remote regions. Often enough the language of bureaucracy and clergy is a completely foreign language. The Iron Age dialects resulted from a sort of lingua franca of this transition period. It follows that the early Israelites cannot have contrasted in any important way to the populations that did not become Israelite - i.e., the cities. The situation in Transjordan was somewhat different; we have not only biblical traditions, but increasing indirect evidence that the eastern and probably southern fringe areas escaped the grammatical breakdown described above. Those local dialects continued the Bronze Age phonetic and grammatical

3. The evidence of continuity of tradition needs to be taken more seriously. The old poems of Numbers 21 certainly must reflect events of pre-Mosaic times, especially Sihon's defeat of the king of Moab. The survival of such traditions and their incorporation into the Bible can be explained only upon the ground that the poems were already known and recited by Transjordanian populations who were probably affected in some way by the events they celebrate. It seems increasinglyprobable that the enigma of Jericho may fall into this same pattern. Events of the pre-Mosaic period were preservedin memory by local populations who later became Israelite, and those local traditions were later incorporated into the "conquest" narratives. Into the same category would fall especially the Jacob stories, but it was always known that those narratives had to do with the pre-Mosaic period. It is most probable that Jacob was already the eponymous ancestor of a small tribal federation in the vicinity of Shechem to Bethel in preIsraelite times and that most if not all of those tribes or clans joined en masse the Israelite federation very early in the history of the Early Iron Age. In view of the thesis presented in this paper, we must borrow from Islamic tradition and theology the concept of thejdhiliyyeh: "thetime, or state, of ignorance, or paganism before there was a prophet." In other words, that which characterized pre-Islamic Arab society, cult, and ideology, comes into that category and rightly so. By analogy, anything authentically historical in the biblical traditions that purport to, or inadvertently do, describe pre-Mosaic cult, society, or even customs should be described by this (or an analogous) term. Unfortunately, under the monarchy, the regime in Jerusalem had to revert to traditions of the Palestinianjahiliyyeh in order to find its ideological foundations for legitimacy in its rule

system to very large extent and would therefore have to be termed proto-Arabic. There is, therefore, simply no region to the East or South from which a Canaanitespeaking population could have come at the end of the Bronze Age, other than Egypt. 2. Equally powerful is the evidence of environmental adaptation. All sources indicate that the Israelite villages constituted a thoroughly Mediterranean type of economy, with cereals, fruit, and domesticated animals furnishing a considerable diversity and economic security. Contrary to some very naive discussions, there is no trace of nomadic origin in early Israelite sources. The stories of the Wanderings have been misused to support nomadic origin, but those stories themselves

over both Israelite villages and still pagan city-states that had been absorbed into the administrative system: the Abraham traditions especially. Later biblical and postbiblical traditions were no longer able to distinguish between the pre- and post-Mosaic traditions, as Aharoni rightly says, quoting the ancients to the effect that "there is nothing early and nothing late in the Torah." 4. The evidence of cult practices points in the have frequently same direction. Anthropologists observed that it is very difficult and rare for village peasant populations to change in toto their ritual and ideology. It is not surprising that many of the early sources deplore the continuation of cults that were made illicit under the covenant. On the other hand, the major

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emphasize most strongly that Moses' band was not adapted to desert life and survived by a series of miracles plus a symbiosis with the Midianites facilitated by Moses' tie by marriagewith that tribe. The economic base had to be sheep and goats, and the precarious existence for a generation was no doubt complicated by disputes over pasture and water rights. At any rate, the biblical sources insist that this small band was entirely gone by the death of Moses, except for Joshua and Caleb. The earliest of the tribes, Reuben, lived in villages. We may date this period from ca. 1225 to 1175 B.C.

DECEMBER 1976

typical village agriculturalfestivals were "historicized"by association with one or another of the events of the sacred tradition. We may note in passing also the fact that the oldest sources of the Bible include many ideas and phrases that stem from Bronze Age mythology, but had been "demythologized." 5. The structure of biblical thought in contrast to the Late Bronze Age paganism can only be explained on the basis of the covenant forms of those sources transferred to the realm of religious thought. One of the most dramatic illustrations unfortunately comes from relatively late sources (Deuteronomy), but it is indubitably correct and furnishes a lead for understanding one of the most puzzling aspects of early Israelite history - the role of Joshua. According to Deuteronomy the Transjordaniantribes were obligated to participate in the "Warsof Yahweh"as a condition for the enjoyment of the fields that had been allocated to them. This was the occasion for the crossing of the Jordan River, which, as many literary critics have observed, has been conflated with narratives of the crossing of the "Sea of Reeds." That crossing, under the leadership of Joshua, was necessitated by the threat of the coalition of Canaanite kings and their impending attack on Gibeon. The successful defeat of that coalition under Joshua led to two phenomena: first, the extension of the role of Joshua (as a prototype of the later successful kings) to that of conqueror of all of the land (except, of course, the old Canaanite urban power centers). Second, it placed virtually all the upland region except Jerusalem in the domain of Yahweh, and the next coalition that we hear of was confined at first to the coastal area - the Philistines. Summary 1. No account of the formation of the Twelve Tribe federation in Palestine need be taken seriously if it cannot integrate into the hypothesis that which was most characteristic of early Israel: its ethical and religious structure of thought. Virtually all other changes that are attested archeologically in the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Ages took place in analogous fashion all over the eastern Mediterranean. 2. The Late Bronze Age system of city-states and empires had broken down, resulting in widespread destruction by violence and great economic impoverishment as well as reduction of military and political power structures to virtual impotence. This is the "tenth generation" effect, and it was (and is) a very complex process that we are barely beginning to comprehend. Crucial to the process, however, was a breakdown of those pagan ideologies that for a time succeeded in holding the socio-political system together. Economic greed and the struggle for power are symbolized by the old Canaanite deities Baal and whatever fertility goddess may have been his consort in each locality. 3. The "wars"of early Israel against the kinglets took place, according to all the evidence we have, at about the transition from Late Bronze to Early Iron and became possible only because of an astoundingly large unity of BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

the existing villages, reorganized into a Twelve Tribe federation under Yahweh their God and King. It was the only basis of unity that existed, since, as the ?ibboleth incident proves, they did not even speak the same dialect of West Semitic. The Israelite "conquest," a misnomer now, therefore had nothing to do with the massive destructions of the mid-13th centuries, but with the transition from Iron Ia to Ib, i.e., ca. 1200-1175 B.C.This correlates with the absence of evidence for the Late Bronze Age in the Negeb and (so far as our evidence goes) in Transjordan. 4. The result was a freedom of the villages from the exactions of the urban kinglets, a rapid growth in the prosperity of the villages, and consequently a rapid expansion of population and the necessity of forming new settlements by a process of what anthropologists call "swarming."This process is probably reflected in some of the biblical "genealogies." Peasant populations tend to invest economic surpluses in population increase. As a village population grows too large for the agriculturaland grazing lands available, a segment of the population migrates to form a new settlement not far away. The new settlement may be regarded as a "son" or "daughter"of the older. 5. The "peace of God" required a bare minimum of military organization and armaments. Except for a few episodes such as the Midianite raids, the ancient Israelite villages reached a modus vivendi both internally and externally that lasted for about ten generations. Unfortunately, the age-old greed for economic and political power touched off by the Philistine federation (or, in this case, amphictyony) caused the Israelite village tribesmen to desert their own religious ideology in favor of "becoming like all the (heathen) nations," and the old process began all over again. As all the pre-Exilic prophets predicted, the result was again destruction. In view of the discussion above, it is urgently necessary to raise the question that many archeologists have never faced: is an archeological level of the Early Iron Age automatically to be attributed to an alleged early Israeliteoccupation?The answer is emphatically no! One might just as well ask whether or not early 19th century dwellings could be identified as Catholic, Episcopalian, or Presbyterian from the evidence of their household kitchen pottery. The same would be true doubtless of present day households. There is no reason to believe that ancient technological products had any more correlation to ideological contrasts than they do at present, except where specific religious symbols are involved.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Freedman,D. N. 1976 Newsletterof the AmericanSchools of Oriental Research,No. 7. Mendenhall,G. E. 1973 The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical

Tradition.Baltimore:Johns HopkinsUniversity.

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TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO OSCAR BRONEER

on

Cultsat St. Paul'sCorinth The Winged Horse, Terror in the guise of Woman, a mystery cult in which water was turnedinto wine,a templewherea holyfountain healedthesick,and a thousandfemale slaves to the Goddessof Love.

Many of the cults in [Corinth] were old and well established. They had continued to function during the century that Corinth lay in ruins, and when the colonists arrivedin 44 s.c. they restored the worship of most of the ancient gods. In the center of the city rose the archaic temple constructed about 550 B.c., the extant seven columns of which are still the most prominent of the ancient remains. Even in St. Paul's day it must have been one of the conspicuous monuments of olden times. Not far from the temple, on the north slope of the hill, was a shrine to Athena (Minerva) the Bridler, built to

fountain dedicated to Poseidon in the Corinthian Agora (Civic Center), but the chief cult place to this deity was at the Isthmia, some seven miles to the east of the city. A well-known Corinthian legend, made famous through the tragedy of Euripides,was the story of Medea, the inhuman sorceress from beyond the Black Sea who murdered her own sons in order to take vengeance on Jason, her faithless husband and father of the children. Less than a hundred yards to the west of the Archaic Temple stands a fountain house, cut out of solid rock, into whose waters the Corinthian princess Glauke, Jason's bride, threw herself when her body was consumed by a poisoned robe, the gift of Medea. Nearby, at the tomb of the slain children, stood a frightful figure of Terror in the guise of woman; and at earlier times annual sacrifices, apparently in the form of human victims, were offered by the Corinthians. By the time of St. Paul's arrival these gruesome practices had been discontinued, but the statue existed and images of baked clay were apparently thrown into the fountain in celebration of the event. The festival was connected with the worship of Hera (Juno) of the Rock, whose shrine was close to the

Suppliants at the health shrine put cash contributions into a large stone box at the entrance. With its equipment for the comfort and healing of the sick, the sanctuary is an excellent example of a pagan hospital.

Fountain of Glauke. A small temple of Roman date, surroundedby a colonnaded court, has been identified as the temple of Hera ... One cult place, abandoned and buried long before St. Paul's day, is of peculiar interest to students of religion. Though nothing is known from ancient writers regarding the cult, it has been possible to piece together commemoratetheharnessingof Pegasusby thelocalhero from the well-preserved remains the main features of the Bellerophon when he rode out to slay the Chimaera. The shrine and to deduce the probable significance of the cult. horse was caught with the aid of Athena while he was In the Agora was a sacred fountain from which water was drinking from the waters of Peirene. The Pegasus myth brought to a small apsidal temple where it seems to have was so famous among the Corinthians that the winged been poured over a stone altar. A plastered channel leads horse became a city emblem, which for hundreds of years underground from the altar to a terrace wall thirty feet continued to be used as the chief device on coins of the away, where it empties into a large stone jar. Along the city. Athena was worshiped among the Corinthians as the channel runs a rock-cut tunnel, large enough for a man to Horse-Tamer, and closely connected with her cult was crawl through on his hands and knees. The tunnel passes that of Poseidon(Neptune),also a patronof equestrian undergroundto a point close to the altar beneath the floor sport. But Poseidon was primarilythe god of the sea and of the cult room in the temple, where it stops dead. The of earthquakes,and the Corinthianshad everyreasonto water channel can be reached from the tunnel. The placate his wrath. The Corinthia has always been a very entrance into the tunnel was barred to the inquisitive by a activecenterof earthquakes,and the city has frequently double door, and a fine of eight pieces of money was been destroyed by them. There was a shrine and a imposed on intruders.

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DECEMBER1976

This elaborate arrangement points to a mystery cult in which water may have been miraculously turned into wine. It would have been quite easy for a man initiated into the secrets of the cult to b'ringwine into the

An initiate would bring wine into the tunnel and mix it with the water that flowed from the altar into the stone jar at the outer end. The shrine was abandoned when the spring dried up! tunnel and to mix it with the water that flowed from the altar into the stone jar at the outer end of the channel. Such wine miracles, connected with the worship of the wine-god Dionysos (Bacchus), are known from other parts of the ancient world, but in no other case are the material appurtenances so well preserved. The cult may have been abandoned after the scant water supply of the Sacred Fountain gave out completely. As early as the fourth century B.C. the fountain became buried beneath the pavement of the Agora and remained thus until the excavators found it fifty years ago. Even the two lion heads of bronze through which the water flowed are preservedin their original position, and the fountain itself is completely intact. There were other cult places of lesser fame in different parts of the city, and statues of gods and heroes lined streets and public squares. Two temples situated some distance from the city center are of special significance in the religious life of the city. At the north edge of the plateau on which the ancient city was built and at a distance of some two thousand feet from the Agora was a temple of Asklepios (Aesculapius) the god of healing, and to his daughter Hygieia (Health). The cult can be traced back to the sixth century B.c., but most of the extant ruins date from the fourth. Like many other shrines the Asklepieion was restored by the Romans and continued to function until the end of paganism. Surrounding the temple of the god were several buildings designed to serve the needs of the patients. Water played an important role in the cures, as one may judge from an elaborate system of reservoirs and water channels distributed over the whole area. There was also a spring called Lerna, from which crystal-clear water still flows the year around. A large building with compartments arranged around a central court contains several small dining rooms fitted out with an open fire place in the center and with stone benches along the walls on which the diners consumed their meals in Grecian comfort. In gratitude for help received - or perhaps in anticipation of divine aid - the patients brought to the temple terra cotta likenesses of the affected parts of the body, but only in a few cases is the effect of the disease BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST

indicated. These thank offerings, modeled with uncompromising realism and painted in natural colors, are now on display in a special room in the museum. The suppliants at the shrine were also expected to put cash contributions into a large stone box placed close to the entrance of the temple. In this container the excavators found thirteen small bronze coins which the ancient wardens had failed to collect. The sanctuary with its cult apparatus and equipment for the comfort and healing of the sick provides an excellent example of a pagan hospital. Such institutions were from the earliest times an integral part of the religious life of the city. Of far greater fame, however, was the temple of Aphrodite (Venus), conspicuously situated on the topmost peak of Acrocorinth. In the legends this mountain was originally sacred to Helios, the Sun God, but was later given to the Goddess of Beauty and Love. In her service were a thousand female slaves, whose presence in the city gave Corinth its reputation for immorality (1 Cor 6:9-20; 2 Cor 12:20-21), and St. Paul found it necessary to warn the Christians against the evil practices of the pagans. In the name of religion these temple servants plied their trade openly and with such success that, according to the geographer Strabo, the city owed its prosperity to the attraction of these entertainers.The cult image in the temple on the mountain represented Aphrodite with the armor of Ares (Mars), using his shield as a mirror and the helmet as a foot rest. Her cult may have originally come from the Orient, but it was well established in Corinth as far back as the beginning of the fifth century B.C. Along the ascent to Acrocorinth were several smaller temples, in some of which foreign cults were housed. There were temples of the Egyptian gods Isis and Serapis, whom the Greeks identified with deities in their own Pantheon. Their worship in Corinth was probably of recent origin, introduced either in Hellenistic times or after the founding of the Roman colony. Marble heads of Serapis have been found in the excavations, and one of them still preserves part of the gold leaf which once covered the face. Cults of foreign gods existed in most Greek cities, but Corinth, because of its large foreign population, may have been peculiarly receptive to innovations in matters of religion. From Acts 18:4-8we learn that the Jews had a synagogue in the city, and other foreign groups had probably established temples to their native gods. Apart from material remains, our knowledge of the city comes chiefly from the description of Pausanias, who visited Corinth about A.D. 170. This indefatigable traveler and antiquarianpaid most attention to the ancient myths and cults; more recent monuments and events he frequently passed over in silence. This is partly the reason that we are less informed about the new cults of the city than about the more ancient religious foundations.

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IT"~ii++++++I!+++II

fly-x....

Sonnet To G.P. "Ourown Vesuviushas clearedits throat" Once more we're living by the Bay of Naples and clouds of black smoke drift, daily, above us. Our own Vesuvius has cleared its throat; volcanic ash is settling in the side-streets. Our windowpanes have rattled to its roaring. Some day we too will be shrouded with ashes.

And when that happens, at that awful moment, I'd like to take a streetcar to the outskirts of town and find your house; and if, after a thousand years, a swarm of scientists should come here to dig our city out, I hope they'll find me, cloaked with the ashes of our modern epoch, and everlastingly within your arms. Joseph Brodsky 1962 From the book Joseph Brodsky': Selected Poems. English translation and Introduction copyright ? 1973 by George L. Kline. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

The

Tabernacle Menorah A Synthetic Study of a Symbol from the Biblical Cult by L. Carol Meyers

The Tabernacle Menorah is a synthetic study of the menorah which stood in the tabernacle of ancient Israel. By treating it as an artifact, and by bringing the methods of philology, comparative archeology, art history and phenomenology together in an investigation of this object, the nature of its physical reality and of its symbolic function within the biblical cult can be understood. It is clear as a result of the study of the biblical and archeological sources that the details of form and fabrication alone do not complete our understanding of the tabernacle menorah. Thus, the peculiar seven-branched shape as well as the general vegetative and repetitive characteristics are scrutinized as they appear in other ancient Near Eastern cultures. In this way, the second level of meaning, the thematic identification of the object, can be determined insofar as Israel's history is rooted in these cultures. Finally, at the third level of meaning, the symbolic value of the object within the biblical cult, as a specific historical manifestation of that object, is approached. The concluding chapter deals with the tabernacle menorah within the Israelite cult. As its emotional overtones become clear, the manner and purpose of this integration into the Israelite religious experience can be understood.

Published by edited by David Noel Freedman Dissertation Series 2 The American Schools of Oriental Research is a sponsor of the Center for Scholarly

Publishingand Services.

SCHOLARS PRESS University of Montana Missoula, MT 59812 Cloth $7.00 ($5.00 to cSPs sponsoring societies) Paper $6.00 ($4.00 to cSPs sponsoring societies)