The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (32 page)

The Assyrian noose was tightening with the accession of Shalmaneser V, an aggressive new Assyrian king. Hoshea proclaimed himself to be a loyal vassal and offered Shalmaneser tribute, but he secretly sought an alliance with the king of Egypt for an open revolt. When Shalmaneser learned of the conspiracy he took Hoshea captive and invaded what was left of the kingdom of Israel. For three years the Assyrian king laid siege to the Israelite capital of Samaria, eventually capturing it in
720
BCE
, “and he carried the Israelites away to Assyria, and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of Medes” (
2
Kings
17
:
6
).

Conquest and deportation were not the end of the story. After exiling the Israelites from their land to Mesopotamia, the Assyrians brought in new settlers to Israel: “And the king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the people of Israel; and they took possession of Samaria, and dwelt in its cities” (
2
Kings
17
:
24
). The ten northern tribes of Israel were now lost among the distant nations. Only the kingdom of Judah, with its Temple and Davidic kings, now survived to carry on God’s commandments and to redeem the land of Israel.

Archaeologists often speak of long periods of time in which little is changed—but only because the nature of their finds makes it hard to identify chronological divisions. There is, after all, no human society that can remain substantially unchanged for as much as two hundred years. Yet that was the traditional archaeological understanding of the northern kingdom, for since the
1920
s archaeologists have excavated some of the most important sites of the kingdom of Israel taking note of no significant change except for its ultimate destruction. As was the case with the archaeological study of the Omrides, the post-Omride era of Israel’s independent history was not considered formative or particularly interesting from an archaeological point of view. In an unconscious echoing of the Bible’s theological interpretations, archaeologists depicted a rather monotonous continuity followed by inevitable destruction. Very little attention was given to the inner dynamics of the kingdom and its economic history (except for some speculation on a single collection of crop receipts from Samaria). As we will see, these are crucial areas of research if we are ever to move beyond the Bible’s exclusively theological interpretation of Israel’s history—that its demise was a direct and inevitable punishment for its sins. The
120
years of Israelite history that followed the fall of the Omrides was, in fact, an era of dramatic social change in the kingdom, of economic ups and downs and constantly shifting strategies to survive the threat of empire.

One of the main reasons for this misunderstanding was the conventional dating system, according to which the entire history of the northern kingdom—from rise to fall—tended to be lumped into a single chronological block. Many important centers in the Jezreel valley and on the nearby Mediterranean coast, such as Megiddo, Jokneam, and Dor, were believed to contain only a
single
stratum spanning the entire history of the kingdom of Israel, from Jeroboam I (in fact, from the Shishak campaign in
926
BCE
) to the fall of Samaria in
722
BCE
. This despite the evidence of major changes and military defeats that took place during this long period—among the most important of which was the invasion of Israel by King Hazael of Damascus, as recorded in the Bible and on the Dan stele by the scribes of Hazael himself.

Something was wrong in the conventional archaeological understanding: how could it be possible that Hazael captured Dan and spread havoc in the territories of the northern kingdom but left no perceptible archaeological trace of destruction?

Hazael’s incursion into the territory formerly controlled by Israel was clearly devastating and did much to weaken the power of the northern kingdom. In the famous stele from Moab, King Mesha boasts that he succeeded in taking Moabite territories from Israel and even managed to expand into Israelite territories farther to the north. The Bible reports that the formerly Israelite-controlled areas of Transjordan to the north of Moab were taken by Hazael (
2
Kings
10
:
32
–
33
). Yet the most striking evidence for Hazael’s offensive is the Tel Dan inscription. While the biblical narrative of the fall of the Omrides connects the massacre of the royal family at their palace at Jezreel with the revolt of Jehu—the reigning king of Israel, Jehoram, being felled by Jehu’s arrow—the reconstructed text of the Dan inscription links the death of Jehoram with an Aramean victory. Hazael boasts: “[I killed Jeho]ram son of [Ahab] king of Israel, and [I] killed [Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram kin]g of the House of David. And I set [their towns into ruins and turned] their land into [desolation].”

So was it Hazael, or Jehu? It is difficult to know for sure. Hazael’s pressure and Jehu’s coup are connected in the biblical text. Hazael may have seen Jehu as his instrument, or perhaps memories of the two events became blurred together during the two hundred years that passed until the first compilation of the Deuteronomistic History. Certainly an all-out offensive by the Syrian leader played a major role in the serious decline of Israel. Hazael’s prime target was control of the fertile and strategic borderland between the two kingdoms, and he apparently not only conquered the Aramean lands formerly taken by the Omrides but also devastated some of Israel’s most fertile agricultural regions and disrupted their trade routes.

The Bible mentions no significant long-term territorial conquests by foreign powers in the lands lying west of the Jordan between the time of the conquest of Canaan by Joshua and the Assyrian conquest. The biblical borders of the land of Israel as outlined in the book of Joshua had seemingly assumed a sacred inviolability. Except for the small area reportedly given by Solomon to King Hiram of Tyre in return for his help in building the Temple, the Bible pictures a stormy but basically continuous Israelite occupation of the land of Israel all the way to the Assyrian conquest. But a reexamination of the archaeological evidence supported by new, more precise dating techniques points to a period of a few decades, between around
835
and
800
BCE
, when the kingdom of Aram-Damascus controlled the upper Jordan valley and significant areas in northeastern Israel—and devastated major Israelite administrative centers in the fertile Jezreel valley as well.

Important new evidence for this has emerged from the excavation of the Omride palace compound at Jezreel, which was occupied for only a relatively brief period in the ninth century
BCE
as it was destroyed a relatively short while after it was built. There was a small settlement at Jezreel in the later days of the Iron Age, but the site never regained its former importance. There is therefore good reason to associate Jezreel’s destruction with the Jehu revolt or with the invasion of Hazael, which both occurred a few years after the middle of the ninth century.

Because Jezreel was occupied for such a relatively short period, the pottery forms found in its destruction level offer a valuable sample of the styles current in the mid–ninth century
BCE
, and indeed are found in the levels of the “Solomonic” palaces of Megiddo and at parallel strata in sites
throughout the north. Readers who were not convinced earlier that the Omrides built these “Solomonic” cities must now consider (in addition to the ceramic evidence, the architectural parallels, and the carbon
14
dates) the likelihood that the violent destruction of those sites—long ascribed to the Egyptian raid led by Pharaoh Shishak in the late tenth century
BCE—
took place around
835
, at the time of Hazael.

Across the fertile expanses of the rich northern valleys, cities went up in flames, from Tel Rehov, to Beth-shean, to Taanach, to Megiddo. On the basis of this new evidence, the Israeli biblical historian Nadav Naaman concluded that these destruction layers represent a devastation of the northern kingdom by Hazael so severe that some of the sites never recovered. The military pressure of Damascus on Israel perhaps culminated in a siege of the capital, Samaria, probably by Bar-hadad III (known in the Bible as Ben-hadad), the son of Hazael. The two sieges of Samaria described in the Bible in the days of Ahab and Jehoram most probably refer to this period.

Archaeology has thus discovered something that the Bible neglected to mention: The very heartland of Israel was occupied for an extended period. None of the earlier archaeologists seem to have found evidence of this event. At Hazor, the period between the Omrides and the destruction of Israel was divided by Yigael Yadin into four strata, none of which was specifically connected with Hazael’s invasion. Yet once the city of the six-chambered gate and casemate wall—long associated with Solomon—is placed at the time of the Omrides, its destruction can be associated with the campaign of Hazael. In Dan, the very city taken by Hazael—in which he erected a victory stele proclaiming his recapture of territory for his kingdom—the conventional dating failed to identify a mid-ninth century destruction, much less a period of Aramean occupation. But at Dan too, the alternative dating allows the identification of a destruction layer for the conquest of Hazael that is commemorated in the Dan stele.

But Hazael was not strong enough to annex the devastated Israelite centers farther south in the Jezreel and Beth-shean valleys, which were far away from the core area of his rule. He apparently left them in ruins, bringing about the desertion of many sites and the decline of the whole region for a few decades. Some of the centers of this region never recovered; Jezreel and Taanach, for example, never regained their former importance. An analysis
of the pottery of Megiddo seems to indicate that this pivotal city for the Israelite administration of the north was deserted for almost half a century.

The Israelite kingdom thus lost effective control of some of its most fertile agricultural regions, and even more important, its rival gained a more permanent foothold at the strategic sites of Hazor and Dan in the northeast. Those sites were located closer to Damascus than to Samaria and were situated in territories that Hazael claimed were originally Aramean. To quote again from Hazael’s own inscription, describing the situation following the death of his predecessor: “And my father lay down, he went to his [ancestors]. And the king of I[s]rael entered previously in my father’s land.” It is inconceivable that Hazael conquered the upper Jordan valley, erected a victory stele at Dan, and then withdrew. Here the victories in the battlefield were translated into long-term territorial dominance.

It is therefore likely that the new city built at Hazor immediately after Hazael’s conquest was actually an important link in a chain of
Aramean
cities and fortresses that guarded Aram-Damascus’s southeastern border against Israel. The city built on top of the destruction layer expanded to include the entire upper Bronze Age acropolis and was surrounded by a new, massive wall. A citadel or a palace was built at its western end, apparently on top of the now destroyed Omride citadel. Even the magnificent rock-cut water system may have been built in this phase of the city’s history.

At Dan, the famous stele was no doubt erected in a new city that Hazael rebuilt. The late ninth century city there is characterized by the construction of a formidable stone city wall, similar to the one uncovered at Hazor, and an exceptionally elaborate city gate. The gate features a special element, unknown in the Israelite and Judahite territories of the time: remains of a canopy, or an elevated platform, were found outside of the right-hand tower as one enters the city. They include two carved round stone bases with typical northern (that is, Syrian) features. The commemorative stele itself, which presumably also mentioned Hazael’s building activities, could have been placed either at the gate of the city or at the elaborately rebuilt ashlar cult place, probably rededicated to Aram’s god Hadad.

Another formidable stronghold built at the same time—and possibly related to Hazael’s occupation of northern Israel—is a site known as et-Tell on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. It has been tentatively
identified by the excavators as the location of the much later settlement of Bethsaida in Roman times. In the ninth century a massive stone wall surrounded the site, similar to the walls built at Hazor and Dan. A huge city gate is similar in shape and size to the one uncovered at Dan. In the front of the city gate the excavators recovered an extraordinary find, which seems to disclose the ethnic, or perhaps more accurately the cultural and political identity of the inhabitants. A basalt stele was found near the right-hand tower as one enters the gate. Its depiction of a horned deity is characteristically Aramean. And its location in front of the gate offers the possibility that a similar stele may have been erected near the Dan gate, under the elaborate canopy.