Abstract

All excavation is destruction… Excavation, however well executed, without adequate publication is wanton destruction.

Dr Kathleen M Kenyon, Beginning in Archaeology

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 24 March 2009

Khirat en-Nahas

Archaeological excavations in Edom have been carried out in the Jordanian highlands and have dated the rise of the Edomite kingdom in the eighth to sixth centuries BC. Because of the lack of any archaeology compatible with a kingdom in strata before then, most scholars conclude the kingdom of Edom began after the eighth century BC, too late for the biblical references to Edomites at the time of the supposed Israelite exodus from Egypt to have been historical, showing the whole Exodus story to be mythical.

The Edomite lowlands in Jordan, between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, contain substantial copper deposits. Archaeological re-excavations in 2002 at Khirat en-Nahas or “Ruins of Copper”, part of the Jabal Hamrat Fidan Project, supervised by Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, have been interpreted as showing Edom existed at least in the tenth century BC, the “time of” kings David and Solomon. This was the conclusion of the UCSD Professor of Archaeology involved, Thomas Levy reported in the British journal Antiquity at the end of 2004. Levy has been director of the Judaic Studies Program at UCSD, whatever one might infer from that about his objectivity, and assistant director of the W F Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. The conclusions here are clearer. Albright and Glueck were biblicists whose wilful confusion remains to be unravelled. It is no distinction to be associated with the schools, of men who were incorrigibly biased, set up to perpetuate it. Quite the opposite. No such man can be trusted.

“If” equals “Because”

The UCSD team excavated and showed two periods of industrial scale copper mining and smelting activity there, in the twelfth to eleventh centuries BC, and in the tenth to ninth centuries BC, dated by Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon dating. Dating was confirmed by New Kingdom (nineteenth to twentieth dynasty, 1295-1069 BC) and Third Intermediate Period (twenty first to twenty second dynasty, 1069-715 BC Egyptian scarabs of a walking sphinx and a hunting scene, though they were found in a later context, and are described as residual. Levy reported a massive fortress and over 100 buildings on the site. The attraction in this fortress is that it seems to have a four chambered gate, and these were once considered to have been characteristic of Solomon. They no longer are, and these chambers ended up being used as smelting chambers, but the authors describe the findings as “spectacular”, and seem determined to hang on to the idea. Levy considers the discoveries indicate a sophisticated society, perhaps a kingdom, long before anyone had thought was possible in Edom. Yet it is all sleight of hand or suggestion:

If this site can be equated with the rise of the Biblical kingdom of Edom it can now be seen to:

• have its roots in local Iron Age societies
• is considerably earlier than previous scholars assumed
• and proves that complex societies existed in Edom long before the influence of Assyrian imperialism was felt in the region from the eighth to sixth centuries BC.

Levy, et al

Levy says it is strong evidence for the involvement of Edom with neighboring ancient Israel, as described in the Bible. Plainly, he and his co-authors are begging the question. They are saying “if” this site can be identified as Edom “then” it proves Edom is earlier than people thought. If you catch a fish with a half shekel in its maw then you can pay the temple tax! Quite so! The three consequences are true, but the condition has to be met first. It has not been, yet the work is presented as “spectacular”—as if the proof had been given!—as if the beginnings of Edom must have been 300 years earlier than anyone except biblicists thought likely, contradicting the earlier sounder work of more respected scholars. And there is no doubt of their intention:

We were aware that what we are suggesting goes against the dominant view that has pervaded over Iron Age archaeology in Jordan for the past three decades.

Levy, et al

A Bayesian Fraud?

Eveline van der Steen and Piotr Bienkowski, who continued the work in Edom of Crystal M Bennett, herself trained by Kathleen Kenyon, do not share Levy’s hype and bombast about the findings. Though the results are of radiocarbon dates, the values used by Levy and his group are not the calibrated radiocarbon dates derived from the raw AMS value given in a table of results but dates refined by a Bayesian adjustment. This latter method incorporates other dates into the carbon date using Bayes’ theorem to weight the various components. A website run by Sheffield University allows anyone to use the Bayesian method. Obviously, it is essential that details are given of whatever the additional data are and what their probabilities are. Christopher Bronk Ramsay, explaining the method says the “chronologies” have to be determined “with sufficient precision and accuracy”, and incorporating…

…information from different sources including absolute age information, relative age information and cross correlations between records. This requires the building of some sort of model whether ad hoc or formal.

Levy does not give these additional data, or explain what his additional information is, claiming this is a preliminary report, though it does not say so, yet still cites the, often much earlier, dates thus obtained.

As an example a calibrated date found for a cooking installation had a value of 1130 to 1015 BC (AMS 2899+-27 BP), yet the cited value was a Bayesian adjusted date considered to have a most likely value of 1190 BC. Another example of an ash layer gave a calibrated date of 1010-920 BC (AMS 2825+-32 BP)) and a Bayesian adjusted date of 1120 BC. The objective of refinements like the Bayesian method are to improve the results. If they do the opposite, something is amiss, and the results should not be used even if it suits your prior assumptions. Furthermore, if the error bounds on the samples mean anything, they deny the reality of the supposed Bayesian improvements because they are outside them! Others were less extreme or made little difference, but the range or spread of possible dates was usually broader after the Bayesian adjustment, making the dating less certain and actually impossible if the error bounds are valid! We read:

We’re not answering the question [of whether Solomon existed] But we’ve brought empirical data that shows we have to reevaluate those questions. We’re back in the ballgame now.

T Levy

When Levy uses the royal “we”, who are the “we” but biblicists? Levy identifies himself with the biblicists, and therefore all the rest of his group. Never mind that centuries of intensive archaeology has never revealed anything about Solomon:

Taking the biblical description of King Solomon literally means ignoring two centuries of biblical research.

Israel Finkelstein

The stories recounted in the Old Testament, Finkelstein adds, “depict the concerns, theology and background of the time of the writers” in the fifth century BC and cannot be accepted as factual. Quite so, but the ancient mines have been visible for 3000 years and could have been incorporated by anyone intelligent into a theological romance. Biblicists like Levy do indeed excavate with a trowel in one hand and the bible in another, still! Then:

If any of the “established truths” from archaeology or historical texts will be proved or disproved in the course of these investigations, it is our duty to do the follow-up and to make the results available to the scholarly community.

Levy, et al

Any scientist would hesitate to make a banal statement like this or use “established truth” in such a context even in quotation marks. Honest science does indeed prove or disprove hypotheses. It does not need saying. Levy, et al, like to speak of biblical Edom, and say their work lets us understand Edom “known from biblical sources”. The authors plead too much, and the suspicion has to be that they are aiming for dates that suit biblical assumptions. These scholars seem to be skewing the radiocarbon dates—which ought to be reasonably objective—with subjective methods that seem designed to get what they want. A later paper gave more detail. The method described did not seem to have anything to do with Bayes theorem, but sounded more like a simplex optimization in which dates from surrounding strata are incorporated with the AMS date of the sample into a multi faceted function which is optimized typically by a Monte Carlo method. Whatever it is, the authors tell us:

If our model assumptions are invalid or inappropriate then the resulting analysis can give misleading results.

As these authors have shown they do not understand qualifying clauses, this is meaningless to them, so naturally they ignore it. By now the authors had achieved their presumed aim of publicity. Biblicists always get media attention by proving that the bible is true, even when they haven’t! And in this case they claimed it was all a mistake, the fault of McMaster University releasing the information too soon, but before long the UCSD News was hyping the same unscientific fantasies. Plainly, Peer review does not work, which can only mean the field is still dominated by holy crooks, and even the universities act more like tabloid rags.

Sound Interpretation

Piotr Bienkowski completed the work at Busayra, Crystal Bennett had devoted much of her life to, and in preparing the final report of the work carefully assessed the chronology of Edomite pottery based on all the relevant evidence. None of the pottery evidence suggested a date much earlier than the seventh century BC. This pottery tradition continued to the end of the Persian period or even into the Hellenistic period. Pottery from the Faynan area radiocarbon dated to the ninth century BC were different from that at Busayra and other Edomite sites. H G Herr insists the local pottery finds must be published to check its typological dating connections with other regions. Almost no pottery finds exist from the Iron I period or Iron IIA from southern Jordan, so dating has to be based on pottery from elsewhere. If this was an earlier phase of the Edomite culture, the continuity of the lowland and highland finds must be shown. Neutron activation analysis would help.

The pottery Levy’s group used for dating the first occupation of the site to the Early Iron Age (c 1200-1000 BC) cannot support their conclusions because it is found in all contexts dating from 1200 BC to 600 BC, yet the authors use the presence of these types of pottery as an argument for a date in the twelfth century. If the fiddled radiocarbon dates were correct, then all that can be said is that the pottery is compatible with those dates, but they are also compatible with much later dates down to the seventh century. The authors are deliberately pushing the dates about a century earlier than the calibrated radiocarbon dating suggests, using a method that is highly dependent on assumptions, in this case apparently biblical assumptions, while claiming the method liberates us from them!

Then they have identified a stone built structure as a fortress. Levy tries to associate the building with other tenth century fortresses in the region which seem to be to protect settlements along a trade route. If it is one of these then it is not likely to be Edomite but associated with the trade. While it is possibly a fortress, it is more likely to be an industrial building in this context. Indeed, a photograph shows it is full of dark blue copper slag, like much of its surroundings. Fortress is an assumption devoid of any evidence. Nothing proves it is a fortress, nothing proves it is an Edomite fortress, and indeed, Egyptian scarabs found on site suggest it might have been an Egyptian structure, and therefore an Egyptian complex, as others in the region have proved to be. So, none of it can be honestly used to show the presence of an Edomite state. Biblcists are generally not honest!

Levy affirms that no professional archaeologist should ignore any relevant information, by which he means the bible, but the whole point is that the bible is not relevant. It is much later than the dates found, even before they were fiddled, is of dubious provenance and contains no certain dating evidence itself, but only what biblicists assume is feasible. Objective science requires objectivity. To prebelieve that the bible is true is not objective and not scientific.

It seems also that the UCSD team actually assigned artefacts to layers they were not in, samples taken from stratum A3 being ascribed to A4a. That is hardly scientific, but seems to have been done because their A3 dates were too early, so they were assigned to the next layer then discarded as unreliable. Two other samples put the boundary of the A3 “fortress” layer and the earlier layer at about 900 BC, so the building came after 900 BC.

H G Herr points out that Iron I copper mines in the area considered to have become Edom in Iron II cannot just be assumed to have been an earlier phase of Edom. The highlands of Edom and center of the kingdom are to the east, but the source of these mines could be east or west. Copper had been mined here since the mid fourth millennium, and seemed to cease only when high grade copper began to be exported from Cyprus—the origin of the word “copper”. The extensive drought around 1200 BC seems to have led to all kinds of disruption in the ANE, and the failure of the supply of copper by sea from Cyprus caused by maurauders like the Sea People made it economically viable to reopen the mines and smelters at the Faynan site. Egyptians mined more copper in Sinai, but less in Timna, so the Faynan sites will have been attractive. They are more likely candidates here than Edomites, though Egyptian ateliers could easily have employed local labour, possibly setting up a fortified industrial site which created a temporary boom town. An industrial complex seemingly out of character with the sophistication of the local people suggests exploitation of the natural resources from a more distant, more advanced society. That was Egypt, whence the scarabs.

Conclusion

Our work also demonstrates methods that are objective and enable researchers to evaluate the data in a dispassionate way.

T Levy

Outrageous sophistry. The methods are objective but the results are plainly fiddled, and the interpretation owes everything to the bible. Without the myth of Solomon, no one would imagine that these mines were anything other than Egyptian, even if the Egyptians used Arab labour.

High-precision radiocarbon dates [applied] to Iron Age archaeological strata offer a less biased approach for establishing a reliable chronology.

Levy, et al

There is no argument that radiocarbon dating could be an immensely valueable tool in archaeology, but, despite what they say, bigots refuse to use it properly. Science must be repeatable. Others must be able to check what someone claims. The data found and used must therefore be available. Work must be transparent. These authors record the basic AMS result (BP, the number of years before 1950, assumimg a half life of 14C as 5568 years), and that is as it should be, providing it is basic and has not had spurious calibrations already worked upon it. All subsequent manipulations of the data should be transparent and depend on hard data, not assumptions. Here they are properly expressed as cal BC, where “cal” indicates a calibration using dendrochronology (INTCAL), the cal BC dates here evaluated by a standard probability method that gives the odds against of being wrong (based on the data) of 20 to one. But then further manipulations are conducted that are less than transparent, though transparency is promised. Moreover, to cite unpublished dates as Levy, et al, do will not do! Of what scientific value is an unpublished date? Nobody can check it. Equally, dates should not be discarded because the excavators don’t like them. The dates might not be wrong, but the excavators—something biblicists will not contemplate. They should give the reasons they think they are erroneous, and then repeat them so as to eliminate the errors, not to fiddle them with fanciful and opaque schemes. And moving findings from one stratum to another is utter malpractice.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History