Judaism
The Lost Temple of Israel by Zvi Koenigsberg 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 20 May 2004
Abstract
Pottery
The author and Zertal seem certain that the pottery types found were unquestionably thirteenth and twelfth century. The only doubt there could be about it is whether the pig’s ear that biblicists have made of biblical dating and the pottery sequences they deduced from them are actually valid at all. Dating in the whole region is utterly circular, and no one seems to care less. All of it is dated by the supposed incursions of the Pharaoh Shoshenq of Egypt, assumed to be the Shishak of the time of Jeroboam. Destructions in the layers that seem suitable are attributed to Shishak and are accurately dated from the bible! Thus, pottery in this layer is accurately dated, and the sequences above and below it have an accurate anchor date allowing the sequence of pots to be used for dating for hundreds of years. Perhaps it is valid, but the tenth century Jeroboam looks like the eighth century one written back 200 years into a mythical epoch. If that is the case, this Shishak is not the tenth century Shishak but Akheperre Shoshenq V who reigned 773 to 735 BC, at the same time as Jeroboam II of Israel (781-754 BC). Then the pottery sequences will have to be adjusted by 200 years, or so.
Scarabs of Thutmose and Rameses II were also found. These pharaohs lived 250 years apart in history, but Thutmose scarabs seem to have become valued as charms. Baruch Brandel of Hebrew University dated both of them and a seal to the time of Rameses II, one of the the favoured times for biblicists to place the exodus from Egypt. The scarab illustrated is that of Rameses, and the author’s blurb says only three identical scarabs have been found, two in Egypt and one in Cyprus, all associated with building work by Rameses. He concludes that, because this site is not Egyptian, the scarab must have been brought into Canaan by an escaping Israelite slave who had been building for Rameses in Egypt.
The period of activity of the Ebal temple was the reign of one of the most powerful pharaohs ever, Rameses, together with some of his successors. Rameses was perhaps the greatest king of Egypt, so can it be said that his scarabs too were not used as charms or heirlooms, so that the dates are not really later than it suggests? Even, if the dating is all sound, it yields a date when Canaan was under the Egyptian yoke. In this time Canaan was an Egyptian colony. What then is so peculiar in finding Egyptian artefacts there? The territory had often and for long periods been ruled by the Egyptians, and ZK himself notes that only a hundred years before the date given here, the Amarna correspondence of Akhenaten proves this part of Canaan was subject to the Egyptians. It does not seem likely that a great king like Rameses would have yielded up this important buffer state between Egypt and its Asian rivals.
Indeed, Merneptah, a son of Rameses, braggs on a stone monument that he has laid waste to Israel, declaring his seed or sons are not, in what is believed to be the earliest historical mention of Israel. But this Israel is a landless people, though they live in a place called Hurru. It suggests that they are not a settled people at all but are Bedouins or shepherds following the seasonal rains with their animals. They must have been worshippers of the Canaanite high god, El, if their name is anything to go by, at that time. It seems to mean, “we are the sons (literally “seed”) of El”, in which case Merneptah’s comment on his stele is a parody of the Israelites own name.
Zertal found a clay penis at a site north of Ebal dating to the twelfth century. It offered more proof the Israelites were in the land because of its indications of circumcision! Zertal thinks only Israelites were ever circumcised, yet it is hard to find people who then were not, and in particular, the Egyptians, of whom there were a lot, practised circumcision, and also occupied the country at the time.
Types of Settlement
ZK thinks the peaceful infiltration idea of some modernists, thought broadly to justify the piecemeal settlements described in Judges, implies that Canaan was unpopulated. He wants to find a reason why the idea of peaceful infiltration must be wrong. The country was populated. Both the bible and the archaeology show that powerful cities with fortifications existed at the time. A rag-bag of escaped slaves could never have been allowed to settle peacefully or otherwise, while such states were powerful.
But the whole point is that the peaceful infiltration was not by outsiders but by the Canaanites themselves. The Israelites had been 400 years in Egypt. Culturally, they must have been Egyptians, but certainly could not, after that time, have been culturally identical to the people who remained in Canaan. Yet there is no archaeological evidence that convinces the best authorities that any culturally novel people arrived. Settlements there were, but nothing found in them distinguishes the settlers from the native Canaanites. The settlers settled in the marginal lands between the cities and their farms in the valleys. The minor differences that have been found, such as in the quality of their pots, and so on, are attributable purely to their poor and marginal existence, and not to their having arrived from some quite different country with different ways of doing things.
Fortunately for ZK’s hypothesis, the conquest by Joshua does not fit it, and is discarded by modern scholars. A common error of the biblicists of the Albright school was to assume that any destruction layers of about the right levels in the strata must have been caused by the Israelites. Well, sure enough, they found a lot of suitable destructions, but as ZK rightly says, a destruction does not have to be by the Israelites. There were plenty of other potential conquerors, including the obvious ones, the Egyptians and the Philistines, and the less obvious ones, the other rival city states. Moreover, some of the cities of the time were not attacked and destroyed. Shechem, the city only a few kilometers from Ebal, was not ransacked in the “settlement period”. It was damaged later, around 1100 BC. The circularity of these dates has been mentioned, but ZK thinks the pottery dating sequences have been improved since they were invented by Albright, et al. Perhaps they have, but have they been improved enough? What anchor dates do they have, if they reject the one they formerly used that applies to a mythical set of kings in Israel, and an assorted set of them in Egypt?
Anyway, ZK thinks the Ebal site is plainly Israelite, and the Canaanites in Shechem did not mind them running it only three miles away on the side of the mountain. He is so obsessed with his temple descriptions in the bible that he will not let the Ebal site be Canaanite. When people like M D Coogan think it, he berates them. Yet, immediately, ZK denies the accuracy of the scriptures. The Israelites had been commanded to destroy the shameful phallic stones worshipped by the Canaanites (Dt 12:3; Ex 34:13), but archaeology shows they did not destroy one in the Canaanite temple at Shechem. It still exists. So, the model for ZK must have been peaceful infiltration, and the Jewish scriptures are, at least partly, wrong. All the bombast about conquest and destroying the lives and culture of the Canaanites must have been the ravings of some biblical megalomaniac, but God liked it and so allowed it to remain in His holy word, even though it made Him seem a monster.
The distribution of the settlements is taken to suggest that that the Israelites came across the Jordan east of Shechem, not 60 miles to the south at Jericho, as the bible says. There are more settlements in the north (Manasseh) than in the south (Ephraim and Benjamin). So, the invaders came in from the north! Deuteronomy 11:29-30 is taken as scriptural evidence of it.
And it shall be when Jehovah your God shall bring you into the land to which you go to possess it, that you shall set the blessing on Mount Gerizim, and the curse on Mount Ebal. Are they not beyond the Jordan, behind the way of the sunset, in the land of the Canaanites that live in the Arabah, opposite to Gilgal, beside the oaks of Moreh?Dt 11:30 Lit
The description is taken to be that of someone looking directly west across the river precisely east of Shechem, and therefore in direct line with Ebal and Gerizim. May be! Like all biblicists with speculative ideas, ZK is fond of weaselly expressions like “might have”, “could well have”, and so forth. Up to a point such vaguenesses are inevitable in trying to reconstruct the past, but biblical reconstructions are particularly replete with them, often because they have to find incredible ways of justifying what is unlikely or impossible. ZK also, at this point admits his approach has not been legitimate by either scientific or traditional criteria. Tradition, which means biblical belief, does not allow the bible to be questioned, and science, it seems, is too fixed.
And now, it turns out that “there is no question” that Israel fought with the locals even if the settlement had started peacefully. He even cites the destruction of the cities as evidence of this aggression, though earlier he had accepted that such destruction could be by anyone around. Zertal seems to agree that the invasion began peacefully before violence erupted. So, Zertal also cannot get into his head that there is no unequivocal evidence of the sort that ought to be there, if there were outside invaders whether peaceful or violent. They cannot answer the problems associated with the idea of an invasion because they will not believe science instead of the bible. ZK will not accept what archaeology has shown, unfettered by his biblical preconceptions. It shows that biblicists cannot be historians, but make excellent novelists.
There is evidence of settlements where there had been none. Why does it mean that the settlers had come into the land from outside to do the settling? No reason except that the bible says so! Zertal and ZK seem to want to believe the bible rather than their own brains because it suits their political choices, not necessarily because they are devoted to God.
ZK now says that Zertal’s survey demolishes the idea that the Canaanites settled their own marginal spaces. The “proof” is that there is no population shift from the coast to the hills! The argument seems to be that the Canaanite cities were on the coast. The settlements were in the hills. So the population must have shifted from coast to hills. It did not, QED!? Since when were all the Canaanite cities on the coast, or even the most important ones? Why does settlement in the hills imply a population deficit on the coast? What stops Canaanites dissatisfied with life in the cities like Hazor, Megiddo, Bethshan and Jericho from trying to work the hills, previously the domain of seasonal shepherds, to grow olives and vines for the city markets? They might have been Canaanites trying to get away from city corruption, or given inducements by city ateliers who would buy their produce from them for sale in the cities. They might have been city paupers jumping at the chance of making a free living and enjoying a simple but hard bucolic existence. There is no need for invaders at all.
What of the supposed direction of travel from east to west, shown, Zertal claims from the evolution of pottery in the journey westwards from primitive pots to more sophisticated pots. If this is the extent of the evidence, what is to stop the precise opposite supposition—the townies moving from the coast to the hills were initially skilled in pottery but over the generations it took them to settle further east, they lost their sophisticated urban skills and ended up making poor quality pots. Alternatively, the quality of the pots might be related to the marginality of the land, the rapacity of the landlords, if there were any, and so on. All of this still ignores the type of pottery being distinctly Canaanite, whatever its quality, and so too therefore were the settlers.
Israelites were not Canaanites—Official!
Now, it turns out that Zertal had actually found a cultural marker, and so had demolished the arguments against invasion. The pottery was, in fact, a different type of pottery from that used by the indigenous people, and it was introduced precisely at this time of settlement, a conclusive finding. It is a devastating discovery for all those archaeologists who had never been able to see any difference in the pottery. This astounding discovery ought to have preceded any further discussion because it refutes all critical arguments about the subjugation of the Canaanites to a new people with a new culture called the Israelites. The bible suddenly has a new respectability.
Yet, why has only Zertal ever noticed this new pottery? He began fieldwalking in Samaria in 1977, and ZK’s book appeared in 2002, 25 years later, and in the meantime no one seems to have found the same pottery characteristic of the Israelites that Zertal did. The collared rim pots found in Israel were once thought to be typical of the Israelites, but now are known not to be because they have been found in places where no Israelite had then trod.
ZK and Zertal are miffed to be ignored by the archaeological community, and it begins to seem clear why. They are making claims that one else can confirm. It is not the obtuseness of their colleagues but their own unrealistic claims. There are still many biblicist archaeologists of both Jewish and Christian convictions that would leap at a chance to confirm Joshua, but no one seems to have turned to Zertal’s astoundingly unique pots to do it. Who is being perverse? The pottery was continuous, according to a swath of experts of different conviction. Even William Dever, God’s Bulldog, accepts it. The claim is so astounding and flies in the face of the archaeological discoveries of the period, that to make the claim with a joke on page 108 seems bizarre in itself.
Now, ZK claims that the “sociological model”, of the Canaanites being the same people as the Israelites, implies the Canaanites made mass conversions to the Israelite religion. Why is the assumption necessary? The Canaanites and the Israelites were polytheistic until about 620 BC in the biblical chronology. In reality, they were polytheistic until 417 BC, and some Jews in distant parts, like Egypt, remained polytheistic even after that, and it is known from sound historical evidence.
It seems the surveys show that 31 LBA settlements expanded to 140 in Iron I. Unless someone moved in, ZK sarcastically says the Canaanites began breeding like “super-rabbits” and built 140 towns while revolting against their masters. It is a puerile staement, and depends upon the reader’s ignorance. The settlements have suddenly become towns to sway the reader.
Just what was a settlement? How many people lived in them? The answer is that mostly they were individual farms or hamlets of a few families. If an average of 35 people lived in each one, the 140 settlements constituted about 5000 people in total. If the settlements were about the same size in the LBA and in Iron I, then the increase of 4x or 5x in 200-300 years is a growth rate of less than one percent per annum! It is entirely within the limits of normal population growth. Why the need to make absurd claims about “super-rabbits”? It is simply that poor arguments have to be presented in an exaggerated manner.
Deuteronomy and the Centralized Cult
ZK contrasts traditional and scientific scholars, saying that by “tradition” he means those who believe the bible account sufficiently to want to try to uphold it in essence, whereas “scientific” means something else, but what is not clear. It ought to mean those who base the history of the Jews on established historical and scientific fact, but here ZK uses it for those who accept De Wette’s opinion that Deuteronomy was what Josiah found and acted upon. Since the aim of the bible seems clear enough in wanting to suggest that a missing scroll of the law was found and acted upon, those who believe it are being no less traditional than the traditionalists, and are not using any science at all.
Deuteronomy constantly speaks of “the place that He will choose” as the center of the cult. ZK notes it appears 34 times, 19 of which are in the original law chapters (12-26). W M L De Wette, a German theologian, observed in 1805 that the center of the cult of Judaism could not always have been Jerusalem. When Deuteronomy was written, the Jewish cult was plainly not centralised at all, and, though the book itself does not mention the city, it is concerned that some cult center should be found. The choice had therefore not been made, and it was evidently not automatic. It is not the general impression given by the bible, nor the general impression that believers have. For them, Jerusalem was the Holy City, and must have been an automatic choice when the temple was founded by David’s son, Solomon. Deuteronomy relates directly to the time when Judaism became centred on Jerusalem. The cult therefore cannot have been founded on Jerusalem when the believers think it was. When was it, then?
It just does not hold water that Moses meant to centralise the cult at Jerusalem before Jerusalem was even in the hands of the invaders, and would not be for several hundred more years, the bible tells us. When the law was really read out to the inhabitants of these hills in the fifth century, Jerusalem was there but was ruined, and other places like Shechem, Shiloh, Bethel, Mizpah must have seemed more compelling places to set up as the center of the cult, assuming too that the borders of the temple state had not been agreed either. The rivalry between existing cults, allegorized in Judges was perhaps a factor in selecting Jerusalem. The quotation cited by ZK:
But go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel…Jeremiah 7:12
will reflect the fact that Shiloh was the intial choice, but had to be abandoned. Jeremiah itself is therefore fifth century and not sixth, and the events in it are not the attacks of Babylonians but the Persian response to the fifth century uprisings in the region. Pseudepigraphic authors always pretend their work is set in the past, Daniel being the obvious example to everybody except biblicists.
In reference to Joshua 22, ZK says Israelite worship had been centralised at Shiloh when the transjordanian tribes built their own altar, yet this is “before the Israelites entered the land”. The shrine at Shiloh therefore could not have been an Israelite one. ZK is certain—“their crime is clear”—the transjordanian tribes had violated the exclusivity of the imagined Israelite shrine at Shiloh. It is clear all right that this is a dispute about shrines, but it fits the squabbles of the Persian colonials than anything 800 years before.
De Wette thought the answer to the time of centralization was in the bible itself. It was when Josiah was told an unknown scroll had been found, and one which altered Judaism utterly. Josiah urgently undertook to reform and centralize Judaism on Jerusalem. Deuteronomy is the only scroll of law that could have been meant and, acting on it, Josiah is supposed to have centralised the cult. If this version is true, then Jerusalem was only the center of the cult of the Jews of Judah for a few decades before the city was trashed, and the temple left in ruins! It hardly seems long enough to form a tradition that could withstand a long exile in a distant and far more prosperous country.
The obvious purpose of such a fiction is to legitimize the changes made by a later ruler, claiming therefore that nothing new was being done, for the last good king of Judah had already implemented the changes before the fall of Jerusalem! The next ruler of Judah was the Persian Shah! In fact, what we read is consistent with Deuteronomy being the law of Moses, itself, but brought into Yehud by Ezra and read out to the assembled natives as the law to be obeyed, or else. When it was formulated, the decision to centralize the cult on Jerusalem had not been made, but Nehemiah and Ezra had the decison from the Persian Shah, and went ahead to build the temple and fortify the city. That is when Judaism began, and the bible was written around Deuteronomy. The temple at Jerusalem was opened by Ezra in 417 BC, but in the decades before Nehemiah and Ezra organized the renovation of Jerusalem as a buttress against Egyptian intransigence, there had been no centralized cult. Other places had served as co-equal cult centers, Shechem, Shiloh, Bethel and perhaps others, and the Ark of the Covenant was a mobile shrine taking the vassalage treaty between the Judahites and the Shah from site to site to be read out. This procedure was then centred on Jerusalem, and the service there involved readings of the law which included the vassalage treaty itself.
Deliberate Burial
The weight of ZK’s argument falls on the fact that no one could have known of the site centuries later in the time of Josiah, or more relevantly Ezra, because the site was hidden. If it was not hidden and this is indeed the site being described, then the biblical authors had no problem. If some other but uncovered site was being described, again there is no problem for the authors. Everything depends upon it being the right site and being soon covered for good, when it could not have been known by later biblical authors, and must have been described when it was used in the twelfth century BC. Yet, if Zertal is to be believed on this, there is doubt about which mountain was which at the time!! Ebal might have been Gerizim, or Kabir, and the site could not have been the right one.
If it is, despite these doubts, then the question of the covering is crucial. How certain is it, it was covered for all this time? A dating method like obsidian dating might have been used,but now that the archaology has messed up the site, it cannot be done. At 2500 feet up the mountain the site does not seem likely to be attracting passers by, and this might be the essential point. No one would be going out of their way to visit an abandoned and remote site whether it was covered or not. It was perhaps briefly used in the fifth century to announce the formation of the Persian colony, and was then covered up so that there could have been no rivals to Jerusalem.
It seems the pottery sherds and the C-14 tests on the animal bones show the site was deliberately buried when it ceased being used. If so, it could not have been incorporated into later aetiological myths, or myths of origins, and so this is an important point, if the identity of the site as that of Deuteronomy and Joshua is correct. No line drawings of typical pottery rims, decorations or jug handles are given as evidence, and no C-14 data at all. This is, after all, a popular book, but another example of it being almost novelistic rather than serious. A few data could hardly put off potential buyers, could they?
On the web, Adam Zertal says fallow deer, and the bones of a couple of specimens described as wild animals were found onsite, having apparently died there. Zertal also gives no proper data, no doubt intending to publish it all at the right time, but dates of the bones of the wild animals and the situations they were found in are valuable bits of information, potentially revealing whether the assumption that the site was buried is correct or not. If it was accessible to wild animals, then the site might not have been covered. It is precisely evidence like this that precludes amateurs from excavating valuable sites. All they do is mess it up for the professionals. That though, seems to be the object of a lot of biblical archaeology, and professional Christians are happy to take their US bible bashing punters on to biblical digs for a suitable fee.
The argument is that no later pottery or bones were found, so the site must have been covered in. Yet, no more charred bones could be expected, and broken pots would be peculiar, once the site stopped being used, but lost items could have been found. A covering of rocks would deter people from wandering around the site, but even so, in 3000 years, with a substantial town not far away, it seems remarkable that the odd object was not lost among the boulders to be found later. On the other hand, ZK describes the site as remote, even though Shechem is not far off, so perhaps it is not surprising that nothing later was ever dropped there. But, if the site was that remote, would anyone have ventured there even if it had not been covered up? The remoteness of the site and not the covering of boulders might have been the reason why the site stopped being used, and even visited. Moreover, old sacred sites often become taboo to later people, either through reverence or fear, just as derelict Churches seem to be feared by the people of modern Christian societies.
So, could the site have been left for 800 years, unattended and feared by the people of nearby Shechem, until it was filled in by the Jerusalem authorities once the Jewish cult was centralized at Jerusalem? Can this be absolutely ruled out by the situation onsite? Could the Samaritans have covered the site when they opted for Mount Gerizim as their own temple Mount? If either is possible, it is possible the scribes who wrote the relevant parts of Deuteronomy knew about the ruined site, and wrote it into their mythical history.
ZK thinks these possibilities are not at all possible, noting that the events are not mentioned again in the bible after Joshua, now putting his faith in the biblical chronology, that previously it had suited him to ignore. In fact, the Mosaic sagas we now have including the bookends that were fitted around Deuteronomy are part of some of the latest compositions in the bible, along with most of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, and parts of Joshua. That is why Moses himself is only rarely mentioned outside of the specific books that deal with him, even though, outside the bible, he never ceases to be spoken of as the father of the Jews.
Eventually, though, we discover that, in the center of the rectangular edifice, was a smaller round stone structure. It was discovered “early in the project”, and later other structures were found around it. This round structure was “carefully built”, but what this means relative to the rest is not explained, and was “filled with a material” that has apparently not been identified 20 years later. The site must have been started by aliens from Mars or somewhere! Is this amateurish or not? The rectangular platform was apparently built around this central structure at a second phase of construction. Immediately, the possibility arises that the central round structure was the thirteenth century one associated with the pottery finds and the charred and dated bones, and the platform was added to it much later, but never, or hardly ever, then used. Possibly, the added structure was only used once, and then filled in—but in the fifth century! Whatever the explanation, the whole was not the purpose built altar claimed in Deuteronomy and Joshua, it was an adaptation of one that already existed, and so does not match the Mosaic instructions. ZK has to admit, this looks as if it had been a traditional site before its extension.
