Judaism
The Lost Temple of Israel by Zvi Koenigsberg 3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 20 May 2004
Abstract
First temple of Israel
ZK had a flash of gestalt and realized that the structure on Ebal was the First Temple of Israel. The first temple had never been built at Jerusalem as the bible made out. The bible was wrong! The implication in the bible that the Ebal temple was built only for a single event was also disproved by the archaeology, though the thought would not have even occurred to anyone that it had unless they had been reading the bible! Deuteronomy and Joshua could not be right to argue that anyone would put up an altar with plastered walls and the Torah written out in seventy languages, or even one, if it was to be demolished immediately a single ceremony had ended, and carted off in bits. The biblical authors were inventing explanations for places and objects they knew of in the land, and the names traditionally given them. If this is the structure described in the Jewish scriptures, their authors knew of it and wrote it into the prologue and epilogue of Deuteronomy and Joshua.
Deuteronomy was written before the cult center had been agreed and Ebal, with its nearby servicing town of Shechem, might, at one stage, have been considered but was then discarded. The propaganda called the scriptures therefore made out it was always intended to be a one-off shrine, and not one meant to rival Jerusalem. If ZK is right that Ebal was set up as the first temple and the central site of the Israelites from the outset, it is a problem that it was only used for 70 years. It signified the start of the nation, specified by Moses as God’s prophet, the scriptures tell us, yet was regarded so indifferently that it was swapped for another place relatively quickly. Such a place could hardly have been abandoned so readily unless the authority of the scriptures is utterly confounded, and if that is so, there is little reason left to believe in the exodus, and so on. It is easier still to think it was a Canaanite site of some sort, probably associated with Shechem, which eventually superseded it.
The site is ringed by two sets of concentric walls, yet the drawing shows only one concentric wall and the walls of the structure itself, part of which is the altar platform. ZK compares it with the temple at Jerusalem with its courts, but the temple at Jerusalem was itself an enclosed space, unlike this one which was open. Other biblical specifications are:
- A burnt offering altar. There can be few ANE cults that did not make such offerings.
- An incense altar, not made of wood or stone, but made of metal. The supposed incense altar at Ebal was made of stone!
- The outer walls could not have been defensive in intention being only 1.5 meters high. Plainly, it demarked the sacred space.
- The Ark of the Covenant. There was no trace of it on the site, although it was mentioned in Joshua 8:33, which is good enough for a biblicist.
The match on the ground is not impressive, but ZK “felt in his bones he was right”, doubtless a strong motivation to go on trying, but hardly evidence of anything except obsessive behaviour in itself.
Ebal looks like a cult center and one that ended, according to archaeology, about the time that the one at Shiloh started, though there is nothing unequivocal that shows the site was for Israelites worshipping in a new way, and not Canaanites. Despite special pleading, Canaanites cannot be excluded and are actually more likely founders of the site than any Israelites. The handcrossing of Jacob cannot be certainly linked to the succession of Shiloh after Ebal. It is quite out of context, and is doubtless a reflexion of the reality of the time the myths were written down, but no one now knows what. Believers always know!
Biblical Descriptions of the Altar
The bible specifies a ramp rather than stairs as access to the altar, supposedly so that no onlooker would be shocked by the enormity of a glimpse of a priest’s manhood! Were people at this time, and that had just come from Egypt where people walked about naked or in flimsies in the heat, really so prudish? The excuse is much more likely to have been invented in Hellenistic times. The Jews opposed Hellenization, a feature of which was a pride in athleticism and the naked body, and naked gymnastics were encouraged in the gymnasia being built. The original reason why the altars had ramps and not stairs was so that the sacrificial beasts could be conveniently driven up them for slaughter. Animals tend not to be too good negotiating stairs.
ZK tells us that three meters is ten biblical cubits, so the giant Goliath at four cubits and a span was about four feet six high! If he was six cubits and a span then he could justifiably have been called a giant at six feet six inches tall. The cubit here is about a foot but surely it was about eighteen inches, making Goliath as tall as nine feet six. The height of the altar is specifed as ten cubits and so this one should have been about five meters high, and at a mere three meters is too small. The author himself says this is a critical point, but, if so, he has described it wrongly somehow.
A ledge about a meter wide leads round the block which constitutes the altar and about half way up it. It too, like the main ramp, slopes down to ground level on the side where the ramp slopes down. The prescription for the altar requires its four corners to be sprinkled with blood, and ZK surmises that the ledge permits access to the four corners of the altar to allow the sprinkling. Yet sprinkling is usually done from above and the four corners can be adequately accessed for sprinkling from the altar platform itself.
The drawing of the complex in the book signed by L Ritmeyer shows a block of stone protruding above each corner of the platform. The priests would most obviously sacrifice the animal by cutting its throat and bleeding it into a bowl which the officiating priest would have sprinkled on to the stones protruding at the corners thus fulfilling the biblical prescription. The ledge is more likely to have been to allow the servants of the temple to wash away stale blood spilling down the corner stones. If the stones were not regularly cleaned, the residue of 50-70 years of sacrifice ought to have been evident on the corner stones.
Moreover, access to the corner stones by the priest would have been cumbersome, if he had to descend to the ledge to sprinkle the blood offering. He had to walk down the main ramp and up the half level ramp, surely an absurd procedure. And, if beasts were separately sacrificed on the ledge by the corners, the dead animals cannot have been manually raised up without considerable effort to the main platform to be burnt. It makes no sense compared with the beasts being driven up the ramp to the platform, sacrificed there and all of the ceremony taking place there.
Prescriptions in Leviticus
To get a handle on his supposed Israelite temple at Mount Ebal, ZK now turns to Leviticus, his favourite biblical book. Leviticus 1:11 prescribed that goats and sheep had to be killed northward of the altar before God. The prescriptions of Leviticus were for the Jerusalem temple, and have been retroscripted into the words of Moses supposed to be a millennium earlier to give them authority, but it stands to reason that a book of elaborate prescriptions like Leviticus could not have been written until there was an elaborate priesthood and developed cult to use them. None of it could have been true of a cult just being newly set up for the Israelite invaders on a temporary altar at Mount Ebal.
The square altar at the temple in Jerusalem was oriented with its four sides more or less east-west and north-south. In fact, it was turned a few degrees anti-clockwise, so that the sides did not direct precisely eastwards but a little north of east. The prescription was that goats and sheep had to be killed on the northern edge of the altar platform. The shape and orientation of the altar at Ebal was quite different. It was rectangular, not square, being 9 meters by 7 meters, and two of its corners, not sides, were directed precisely north and south, meaning that the remaining corners were not directed east and west. No diagram or plan showing the orientation is given, another deficiency in the book, but it is possible, from the description, that the corners roughly east-west are about 14 degrees north of east, or 14 degrees south of east, the former roughly matching the orientation of the Jerusalem temple. So, the corners seem the important alignments of this temple, not the sides.
ZK explains that temples were oriented with their corners north and south, only in Mesopotamia, home of Abraham, not in Egypt or Canaan. Presumably, this is supposed to have been remembered by the enslaved Israelites from the time of Abraham about 600 years before! God does these things, if you are a biblicist, but historians are not so gullible. If this orientation betrays Babylonian influence, it was put up by people with that direct experience themselves. The Persian colonists in the fifth century being the obvious contenders.
If this is the explanation of the orientation, it means the platform structure and the pottery and sacrifices found around it are unrelated! The platform therefore must have been built on a site already existing but from a much earlier time. If this seems too far-fetched, then the orientation of the corners cannot have anything to do with Mesopotamia.
Anyway, the point of all this is the prescription of killing the goats and sheep on the north side of the altar. It seems Zertal had found blood in the earth by a flat stone at the north corner, and took it as proof the priests of Ebal were following the prescriptions of Leviticus. Again this seems crazy. If the blood was found in the earth beyond the altar platform, the dead beast would have had to have been hauled up the ramp to the sacrificial fire. Barmy! The prescription in Leviticus could not have meant the animals were killed beside the altar then manhandled on to it for burning. The Israelites must have been half-wits, if they did this. The killing happened on the altar platform, at its northern side, not beyond and below the altar to the north of it. Moreover the instructions plainly say “side” not “corner”, so, if blood was found where it was, and Zertal is right about what it meant, the priests were not following Leviticus.
Regarding the blood that was found, was it scientifically confirmed as blood? If so, was this C-14 dated? If not could it have been rust? How were the animals killed? Using knives of iron, bronze or flint? Iron was forbidden in the making of the structure so, it ought not to have been used in sacrifice. Yet, a new and amazing metal like iron could have been seen as a gift of God. The realization that it was a gift of God to the warrior as much as anything else, sounds like a later judgement. The walls were made of unhewn stones for practical reasons, not for fear of polluting them with a murderous metal. If iron tools were used in killing and butchering the sacrifices, the stain could have been rust, the flat stone being where the whetstone was set up. Were knives found? Whether iron, bronze or flint was used, some must have been lost or discarded and so should have been found.
Anyway, believing the site fits the description in Leviticus, ZK completes the usual biblicist’s circle by claiming that Leviticus must have been written to fit the Ebal site. Leviticus is therefore proved to have been written in 1250 BC. At least it proves, too, that Moses did not write this part of the Torah!
House of David
ZK decides to find cult references that pre-date Jerusalem, and to do so has to look to the tenth century because he thinks the bible is telling true history! The evidence on the ground offers no evidence there was a city on the site of Jerusalem in the tenth century. Jerusalem did not become a significant place until the sixth century. That Ebal was a cult center seems quite reasonable, but ZK wants to show it is the cult center of Judaism before Judaism was centralized at all. It is unlikely that primitive priests would make it hard for their people to worship, such as having to stomp 40 miles or so to attend church around 1000 BC! There had to be a big power behind any such centralization. It was the Persians.
ZK says that Jerusalem has been the only real capital of Israel. Jerusalem was never the capital of Israel until the country was reinvented. Samaria was the capital of Israel. No one knows what the name of the invisible “United Monarchy” was, but since it was never visible, it does not matter. Even so, ZK tells us that the “House of David” ruled from Jerusalem for four centuries. No one knows anything about David or his house, except what is in the mythology called the Jewish scriptures. A broken stone apparently inscribed by a victorious Aramaean king has the word “bytdwd” inscribed on it. It is eagerly read as meaning House of David, but, if that is what it is, it is the only extra-biblical mention of it, and it is not certainly a reference to a dynastic House of David, or to a house or a David. If it is not a completely unrelated word of unknown meaning, it could still mean a temple of a god, a palace of a king, or a country of a king or a god, as well as a dynasty, and the name could be David or Dodi, or could be the title, “The Loved One”, or the adjective “beloved”—among others. Moreover the stone could be a forgery, but no independent authorities have been allowed to perform forensic tests on it to authenticate it. In short, David remains mythical, Tel Dan stone or not.
Most biblical scholars agree that by the time of David, around 1000 BCE, the tribes had blended and become a single nation.Zvi Koenigsberg, The Lost Temple of Israel
This comes at the beginning of the concluding chapter, but there is nothing scholarly about it. Biblical “scholars” might think it, but no scholars do. It is more biblicism. Nothing is known about any Davidic “United Monarchy”, as has already been said.
Some Critics
ZK complains that no one, even 14 years after Zertal’s preliminary paper, not even his mentor, Benjamin Mazor, a doyen of Israeli archaeology, has supported his conclusion that this was an Israelite sacrificial site. Mazar always remained cagey about the claims about this structure, and never committed himself to them. ZK was proud to bragg to Mazar that he and Zertal could prove the bible. Mazar replied, profoundly impressing ZK, that “we don’t have to prove the bible, we have to understand it”. Does Mazar take the bible to be true by definition but unclear? Or does he imply that some bits might be true and other bits fiction, and we need to understand which are which. The latter is the rational approach, but not that taken by the author of this work. By understanding the bible, we might have to understand it to be false.
ZK wonders whether Zertal is “far removed from reality”. “Not at all!” It is the corpus of opinion that is removed from reality! Zertal’s survey “leaves no doubt”. The settlement of Manesseh was by a joint process of infiltration and conquest, and the conquerers were Israelites. They were not Canaanites because they reflect no cultic tradition that was Canaanite. Canaanites evidently did not sacrifice animals because the only cultic tradition for this site was judged to have been for sacrificing animals.
Yet, Canaanites had similar altars, even according to the bible, called “high places” (bamahs) because they were al fresco altars, usually on a hill or mound. Surely, if this site was an altar, it was one of these Canaanite ones. No, evidence has nothing to do with it, according to ZK, it is because the academics are idle to a man and cannot be bothered having to revise their lecture notes! Either all these academics are lazy and Zertal and Koenigsberg are correct, or Zertal and Koenigsberg are cracked pots, and the rest of academia can see that they are.
The archaeologist, Aharon Kempinski, categorized the Ebal structure as an Iron Age watchtower. ZK thought he was being harsh, but all the more likely explanations have to be eliminated by the evidence before a less likely possibility can be admitted as a solution. You do not have to be Sherlock Holmes to know this. Perhaps it was a watchtower in Egyptian occupied Canaan, and served as a base for a platoon of the army, or irregulars keeping a lookout. The pots and the burnt bones might have been from feeding these men for a century. Kempinski must have had good reason for thinking it might have been a watchtower, even if ZK thinks he was unfair. Apparently Zertal rebutted the argument, but ZK does not bother.
The Scientific Outlook
ZK acknowledges that scientific theories “invalidate the historicity of the biblical narrative” and have “logical legitimacy”, but goes on that these theories put a stranglehold on any research that might disturb them. The main stranglehold on biblical historical research is the insistence of the believers that they are right whatever history or archaeology might say. In so far as ZK is right about science, it is his misunderstanding about how science works, as it is for most believers.
Science seeks the best available hypothesis, that is, the one which best explains the most significant events. It cannot be beholden to figmentary fathers or sons, and indeed is bound to find explanations that exclude the supernatural because history shows no signs of being run by supernatural creatures. If the best hypothesis has been found, it might seem frustrating to someone like ZK that no scientific historian will consider his. The reason is that his hypothesis is not as good as the currently held ones.
The specific reason, in this case, is that the ZK hypothesis requires biblical historians to reject what they consider is proven. It is that the Israelites came into Canaan from outside. Nothing proves this and the evidence that is taken to suggest it is dubious. Israelites were Canaanites, and so a hypothesis that requires them to have been Egyptian slaves that escaped from Egypt to move into Canaan cannot be considered unless the evidence for it overwhelms the evidence for the currently held paradigm. The point about the scientific approach is that it can change, given compelling evidence. The biblical one cannot without proving the bible to be wrong. Believing bits of the bible on faith but arbitrarily altering other bits to make the “theory” fit is not scientific or legitimate.
God’s Truth
An interesting bit of information is that the only biblical scholars accepted by orthodox Jewry are the gadols, some sort of Jewish theologian. No gadol would support what ZK and AZ were saying, and so they were getting nowhere with the orthodox community. ZK relates that he explained his views and the evidence to one gadol, hoping for his support, but he replied:
I have to agree with your conclusions, but, if I live a thousand years, I will never admit it out loud.
This is remarkable as an admission that Jewish theologians, like Christian ones, would sooner lie than admit the truth. No Jewish biblical “scholar” wants to admit that the original temple could have been in Samaria and not in Jerusalem, so they will not.
As long ago as the fourteenth century, Ibn Ezra, the Spanish Rabbi, pointed out that Moses cannot have written Deuteronomy as tradition had dictated because it begins:
These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel, on the other side of the Jordan.
The writer is already on the west bank, looking towards Nebo, while relating the words that Moses said while he was on the eastern side of the river. The author of these Torah passages was therefore not Moses. ZK revealingly goes on after explaining this that Ibn Ezra instructed anyone who notices this to stay silent! The Rabbinic lack of interest in truth obviously parallels that of professional Christians. They are interested in God’s Truth, which they agree upon among themselves. They have no interest in or respect for anything contrary to their own preferred religion. For all they know God could be desperately tryiing to reveal their error over 3000 years but Satan is too clever for them. Like the three wise monkeys they will not apprehend evil, except that it is truth they refuse to consider.
At the end, ZK gives a citation from the thesis of G A Danell on the name Israel in the Old Testament. It backs up the idea that the first choice of a temple mount was Ebal, and later the change was made to Jerusalem. Danell thinks Deuteronomy has northern Israelite features, meaning it is Samarian, backing up the suspected change from Gerizim to Ebal. Gerizim became intolerable to the Jerusalem priesthood, but obviously Jerusalem could not have been substituted for Gerizim, so Ebal was substituted instead. Of course Danell was not a gadol, so his views were worthless.
The bible is propaganda, written long ago to give the Jews a deed of entitlement to the land they had been given as Persian colonists. ZK’s sub plot is precisely to show this entitlement, contrary to Arab claims to Palestine. Plots of land bought 3000 or 4000 years ago prove the land is Jewish. The Arabs who have lived here for 2000 years can just clear off. God said so!
A marvellous thing belief. God’s Truth, indeed! Believers will enjoy this book, and perhaps some historians too.
From Zvi Koenigsberg
I am truly sorry for asking for your comments, and exposing in your attitude the very trait I accuse academia of in my book, namely, dealing with the matter of the body, and not the body of the matter. For one, you do not know what a Biblicist is, if you think it includes someone who contends that Genesis 48 never happened, but was an allegorical coverup. Apparently a Biblicist to you is anyone not enamored of the Persian theory you espouse. As for calling Zertal a Biblicist, that is pitiable at best. Even his greatest detractors, including and especially Finkelstein, do not for a moment accuse him of scientific dishonesty. For you to be right, an entire series of professionals had to have conspired with Adam. It sounds eerily like the faith many in the Christian and Muslim worlds have in the historical "legitimacy" of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Of course, with your views on Israel, you may very well believe in them as well. I cannot begin even to critique your "understanding" of Samaritan vs Samarian etc. It does not deserve my attention. At least I now understand how many well-wishing Western Europeans could actually have nominated and awarded Yasser Arafat a Nobel Peace prize. It is the same kind of intellectual "honesty" which drove your last comments.
These are my last words to you. I promise that I will at least not embarrass you by quoting you by name in any future article or book I may write. I am truly sorry for you.
