by Simon Schama
What does this all add up to? The contention of these ultra-revisionists is that the Bible should be treated as nothing more than the fantasy of exiles, played back in time, and answering to the need for a myth of ‘coming-into-being’ as a distinctive people. That biblical epic of ancestry relates the history of a nation fully formed at its moment of origination as one-God worshippers, who then take that cult with them into Canaan and institute it in the Jerusalem Temple. It is not to be confused with history.
But this ‘minimalism’ has been a massive over-correction, now confounded by much recent archaeology and sensitive revisiting of earlier evidence like the Siloam Hezekiah Tunnel inscription. It is already apparent that the ‘minimalist’ view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede. Though a work of many centuries and generations, the Hebrew Bible itself could not have begun in the Babylonian exile, much less have been mostly written still later in the Persian and Hasmonean periods as the ultra-revisionists claim. For a precious amulet – in the form of two tiny silver scrolls, one of them bearing the Hebrew verses of the priestly blessing, originally written in the Book of Numbers, and to this day used in synagogue services on holy days – was found in 1979 in one of the burial caves of Ketef Hinnom, south-east of Jerusalem, by the archaeologist Gabriel Barkay. In all likelihood the scrolls were worn in rolled form on the upper body, as a talisman, invoking the blessings of God against evil and misfortune. Whoever wore them had substituted the words of the Torah for what elsewhere would have been an image of a protective deity. And startlingly, irrefutably, they have been dated with precision to the late seventh century BCE, the reign of the reforming Temple-cleanser and Book ‘discoverer’, Josiah.
So although the earliest complete texts of books of the Bible are the Dead Sea Qumran Scrolls securely dated to the third and fourth centuries BCE, the silver scrolls of Ketef Hinnom push the date of writing back to the late-Judaean monarchy. Since Aramaic largely replaced Hebrew as both spoken and written language by the fourth century BCE, it seems unlikely that most of the Bible could have been written by that date. Even with Hebrew preserved as the language of the priestly and scribal classes, it’s known from the much later apocryphal and wisdom books among the Dead Sea Scrolls that Hellenistic ‘modern’ Hebrew is of a drastically different character and style from the ‘classical’ Hebrew in which most of the Bible is written. It was always improbable that amid the devastation and depopulation that followed the Babylonian destruction, the kind of literary exuberance and power needed to put the Bible together could have been flourishing in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. It makes much more sense to see the Bible texts arising from the yeasty Hebrew – shared by the people’s tongue, the priestly poetry and the scribal skills – in the late eighth century BCE monarchy of Hezekiah’s Judah. The later, sterner strictures of the Deuteronomists – their religion of the ‘empty throne’, wiped clean of any cultic figures, the sacred shrine occupied only by the Torah and the kabod (the ineffable glory of YHWH) – then gave the Bible its harder form, two centuries later, before and after the Babylonian disaster.
With every new discovery a more nuanced picture of the earliest history of the Jews is being sketched in – one not of course identical with the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, but one not entirely disconnected from it either. In 1993, a ninth-century BCE stone stele was discovered at Tel Dan in far northern Israel, bearing an Aramaic inscription of the Aram king Hazael celebrating his victory over the king of Israel and, explicitly, in line 31, the ‘House of Dwt’. So much, then, for the minimalist assumption that David and his dynasty were the imaginary invention of later generations of scribes. The story of the emergence of a distinctive Israelite state and Hebrew-language culture needs to be uncoupled from the story of the Jewish monotheism, brought together by the Bible writers as though, from the very start, the latter defined the former. That is manifestly not the case. But the two elements of a distinctive Jewish history – state and story – did evolve and in some connected way, the one braiding around the other, often fraying, sometimes torn off altogether, long before they found the tight weave of the canonical Bible text.
There is no longer any doubt that a Jerusalem-centred mini-state – with a probable population in the time of Josiah and Hezekiah of around 40,000 in the city alone – was far more than the largely illiterate ‘cow town’ to which ultra-minimalists have relegated it. Provincial city-forts like Gezer and Hazor were formidable establishments, boasting six-chambered gates, fortified quarters for local officials, paved ways and piazzas, capacious storehouses and stables. And they were constructed not of rubble stone but ashlar – dressed and smoothed masonry, often of imposing size. The organised labour and engineering needed to make such places presupposes the heft and hierarchy of an ambitious military state. Ramat Rahel, on the southern side of Jerusalem, had what Y. Aharoni and Ephraim Stern confidently describe as ‘the last royal Judaean palace’ built of fine limestone masonry, a courtyard decorated with proto-Aeolic capitals and carved window balustrades made of exquisitely scroll-like heads and ‘fallen leaf ’ motifs, entirely apt for a place facing Assyrian destruction.
From little, often minute things, a big picture emerges. Those small objects are seal impressions, pressed into clay or wax by seals cut from hard semi-precious stones, and which were once attached to documents written or sent by officials of the king. Fifty-one of them alone were found in excavations in the City of David. Sometimes they are no more than the petalled rosettes (very beautiful in their simplicity) that seem to have been the personal stamp of the Judaean kings. But, in the Near Eastern way, often they picture beasts, birds, heavenly bodies: beetles; a winged sun-disc; the roaring lion of Shema, servant of Jereboam (most likely King Jereboam II of Israel); a monkey; a lily; an ass; the lyre that indicated a royal princess, Ma’adanah, daughter of the king. Looking at them under the glass restores to life not only the important men ‘Over the House’, as the bureaucratic phrase went – a sar’ir, governor of the city – but the many under the House: the craftsmen and artisans who fashioned the seals. And others too, suddenly brought together in the community of picturing and writing: those who incised letters into pots and jar handles, often lmlk for the king, but also signifiers of property – Shalomit, daughter of Zerubbabel; Avanyahu, servant of the king.
These are not masterpieces and that is the point. Unlike some Egyptian and Mesopotamian sites, what the fragmentary potsherd documents, the seals and jar-handle inscriptions suggest is a great web of connections wound across the territories of Israel and Judah, from Samaria through the Judaean hills and down into the Negev, binding together the worlds of religion, military power, the operations of the law, the gathering of taxes, the needs of the table, the delight of the eye (those proto-Aeolic capitals!), the stamp of ownership, the authority of the king, and even the calendar of the farming life.
For those who remain unconvinced that this has any connection to a world pictured in the Hebrew Bible, even inscriptions in the name of ‘Gedaliah Over the House’ – the governor appointed by the Babylonians after the destruction of Jerusalem – or Gemaryahu son of Shaphan specifically mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah, won’t be enough to undercut the conviction that the Bible was exilic retrospective fantasy.16
But then there is the view from Khirbet Qeiyafa. I first saw it in the early spring of 2011 with the archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who is continuing to excavate the site.17 The low hill is in the Shephelah, thirty kilometres south-west of Jerusalem, on what has always been assumed to be the frontier zone between the Philistine-dominated plain and the Jerusalem hill state of the Judaean monarchy. In early April the countryside is spectacularly fertile, so lushly green you can forgive the Victorian travellers for constantly making comparisons with Kent and Yorkshire. Winter rains have filled brooks and ponds; ancient oaks are already bright with leaf; meadows are sprinkled with wild
flowers. One of them, a wild lupin peculiar to a neighbouring hillside, grows so intensely blue that it draws botanical pilgrims from all over Israel to marvel at its dense, brief flowering. Later that week I’d met Jerusalemite writers, embattled as usual with the country’s trials, who wanted to do nothing but talk, for once, of lupins.
But Khirbet Qeiyafa sits in a place of unflowery strife, past and present. Its hill, like the neighbouring sites of Socoh and Azekah, mentioned in Joshua 15:35, commands the ancient roadway between the hill cities of Hebron and Jerusalem and the coastal plain of Philistia. To the west would have been the Philistine stronghold of Gath (located at the present site of Tel Safi). Because the valley of Elah below Qeiyafa is the site where, according to the Book of Samuel, the shepherd boy David slew the Philistine warrior-giant Goliath, the Bible-tracking Victorians all made sure to pass through without paying close attention to the low wall on the brow of the hill, facing (as it still does) the encampment where Bedouin come to park their flocks in the bright pasture. Khirbet, after all, means ‘ruin’ in Arabic, and the Victorian mappers had already seen enough to last a lifetime. This one was ‘just a pile of stones’, Conder wrote shruggingly.
It took some time to realise that Khirbet Qeiyafa was far more than that. That it was a site of some significance had been clear from the 700-metre wall encircling the five-acre settlement on the crest of the hill. But from the relatively small size of the stones visible on the wall it looked to be a structure of the Hellenistic period between the late fourth and second centuries BCE. It was only when Saar Ganor, then one of Garfinkel’s students surveying the site in 2003, noticed a glaring size difference between the stones on the superstructure and much larger blocks below, half concealed by a rising curtain of weeds, that it became apparent that there might be a much older dwelling at the base. Clearing away the brush, the scale of these stones revealed themselves as megalithic, some as much as three metres long, some of them weighing as much as five tons. These were building blocks that would have required massive mobilisation of labour, nothing that an isolated peasant village could have accomplished. Better yet, beneath that layer of what the archaeologists call ‘cyclopean’ (that’s to say, gigantic) stones was solid bedrock. So unlike many sites that had experienced periods of habitation and destruction, this one had been built, inhabited then suddenly abandoned and only reoccupied during the period of its Hellenistic topping. There would be no jumbling of artefacts to muddle its chronology.
Excavations beginning in 2007 exposed a densely inhabited fortress-settlement home to around five or six hundred people, divided into a lower city and an acropolis on the summit. The defensive perimeter was casement: an outer and an inner wall separated by space enough for stores, guards or even rudimentary accommodation. Since casement walls largely disappear from such sites after the tenth century BCE, this is another indication of an earlier date, most likely from the united not the divided monarchy. Directly abutting the walls were numerous domestic dwellings, many of them four-chambered. In the middle of the western face of the wall was, unmistakably, a broad monumental gateway, its stones some of the most ‘cyclopean’ of the site. Later excavations exposed what Garfinkel believes (not uncontested) to be a second gateway at the other end of the fort, persuading him that Khirbet Qeiyafa (or, as the Israelis have now called it, ‘Elah Fortress’) is in fact the uniquely two-gated Sha’arayim mentioned in Samuel.
Yossi Garfinkel is not a biblical romantic. He does not see himself as a recruit in the Bible wars, between old-style zealots who insist on a core of historicity in the books, and those who believe them to be an entirely literary construction, especially in their depiction of a centralised Jerusalem-based monarchy ruled by the imaginary David. ‘I’m not religious!’ he protests to me on a visit a year later. ‘My wife grew up on the only kibbutz to raise pigs. I have no stake in making the Bible true or false. I just see what’s in front of me.’ Whether he likes it or not, though, Garfinkel is caught in the crossfire, especially since before excavating Khirbet his speciality was Paleolithic and Neolithic history, and the way he sighed while explaining the battles that had come his way above the valley of Elah, there are days I suspect he might sometimes wish to go back to that earlier, quieter age. But he is stuck with Qeiyafa because the implications of what has been revealed are so explosive.
What can hardly be disputed (though naturally it has been) is the antiquity of the fort. Burnt olive pits found on site, subjected to exacting carbon-dating examination in faraway Oxford, were dated to the late twelfth or early eleventh century BCE. This makes Qeiyafa indisputably an Iron Age stronghold, but whose citadel? Its strategic importance is self-evident, but it is right on the moving frontier between the Philistine power on the plain and Judaean settlements in the hills; Gath in one direction, Jerusalem in the other.
With no axe to grind, Garfinkel became convinced it had to be a work of Israelite Judaea, not Philistia. He insists the back casement walls doubling as the front walls of domestic dwellings are unknown on Canaanite sites, and anticipate identical configurations at other indisputably Judaean forts at Arad, Gezer and Beersheba. It is also true that in late-Canaanite culture, new settlements and fortifications are generally built atop the remains of anciently inhabited sites. Iron Age Khirbet Qeiyafa on the other hand, was raised on a completely fresh strategic hilltop site, strongly arguing for it being an outpost of a new, rapidly emerging warrior and cult-driven state.
Then there is the matter of what was not found at Khirbet Qeiyafa, namely the bones of pigs. Bone remains from every other known domesticated animal – goats, sheep, donkeys and cattle – were discovered in their thousands, but not one from the swine forbidden by the dietary strictures of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Sceptics have been quick to point out that abstinence from pork was widespread in the entire region, so that the absence of pig remains is not, of itself, any kind of evidence of Judaic settlement. But the pork aversion, due probably to trichinosis brought on by the infection of pigs by roundworm larvae, is usually dated two centuries later than the olive stones of Qeiyafa. And the single local culture which persisted in eating pork was the very one directly confronting the hill fort: the Philistines.
And then, in a water conduit, on one of the annual summer digs, a clay potsherd, inscribed with alphabetic words written in ink, was momentously discovered by one of the student volunteers – as potentially momentous in its way as the abecedary of Tel Zayit or the tunnel story at Siloam. There are six lines of writing, but many of the words and letters remain teasingly indecipherable, either because of the faded condition of the ink, or because it is not yet indisputably clear which language they are written in. The letters might be proto-Phoenician, the alphabetic language out of which ‘old’ Hebrew eventually emerged, or they might as easily be an embryonic stage of that Hebrew itself, consistent with the spread of literacy in the Shephelah controlled by the Judaean kingdom the minimalists believe never existed. Taken together with the Tel Zayit abecedary, of an equally early date, though, evidence is mounting that the spread of alphabetic, scribal writing in the western hinterland of Jerusalem was burgeoning, almost certainly earlier than has yet been acknowledged.
None of this is quite enough, however, for those who have rushed to proclaim the site as not just an outpost of the Davidian state, but a place aware of a Bible that must have been written before the eighth century BCE.18 A Haifa University historian, Gershon Galil, proposed a reading of the pottery shard – ‘judge the widow and the orphan . . . restore the poor at the hands of the king; protect the poor and the stranger’ – that makes it sound like a rehearsal of ethical precepts uncannily like those found in Exodus, Isaiah and Psalms. Galil also had no trouble seeing words like ‘asah’ (‘it is done’) that were unique to Hebrew. Those who fiercely dispute Galil’s reading as overly imaginative fail to see such words, and those they do see are said to appear in non-Hebrew texts elsewhere. Haggai Misgav, the epigrapher asked by Garfinkel to study the inscription, makes out far fewer deciph
erable words, although one of them does indeed seem to be the Hebrew for ‘judge’. But versions of the message can also be read to disclose cryptic hints of revenge, or even the names of persons.
What is apparent, though, is that the writing in Qeiyafa consists of something more than just an arbitrary assembly of disconnected words; that they form a continuous text and most likely a communication of some sort from someone to someone else. Not enough? Enough at any rate to make Sha’arayim somewhere that like Arad later was a strategic outpost, a place to write to, to enclose a hum of inhabitants – soldiers, their wives and children, scribes, farmers and traders – by the standards of the Iron Age a little town. And it’s the remains of that world, its daily routines, that fire my imagination most excitedly as we stand in the sweet spring air of the Shephelah: the standing stones of one chamber that Garfinkel believes are the hitching posts of a small stable, probably for draught animals. Further down on the site we squat to look at Iron Age kitchenware: a grindstone; another with raised points that could have been used to rasp and grate. On one of the digs, along with all kinds of bright red domestic ceramicware – jugs and amphorae – a very beautiful baking tray was found. I am suddenly at home in this kitchen, preparing a meal, reaching for the oil.
Yossi stands up, arms akimbo, and surveys the whole place, anticipating another season of the dig coming in the summer, imagining the ‘pile of stones’ as an educational archaeological park for school-children from all over Israel. He is not remotely a zealot, not the kind of archaeologist like Palmer who went to the Holy Land with a trowel in one hand and the Bible in the other. All he is after, he says, is the truth. Something between a smile and a frown settles on his friendly, owlish face. ‘Look, you need real builders to make such a place, the steps, the streets, the casemate walls; it’s not something a bunch of shepherds could or would do. You need some sort of state that can draft the labour to get stones this big here – some of them are even more than five tons apiece. You need taxes, a written culture. And this isn’t the Philistine version.’