No title

The BIBLICAL

ARCHAEOLOGI

?or-

Publishedby THE AMERICAN SCHOOLS OF ORIENTAL RESEARCH

126 Inman Street, Cambridge,Mass.

Vol. XXXII

December, 1969

No. 4

?';•t~.• •'oso

it:

Fig. 1. Aerial view of the lower slope of Mt. Gerizim, looking southwest. Adjacent to the two houses in the foregroundare the re-excavatedremains of the Tananir sanctuary. All photographsare by Lee C. Ellenberger.

Contents Bronze Age Buildings at the Shechem High Place: ASOR Excavations at ....... Tananir, by Robert G. Boling Tribal League Shrines in Amman and ........................................... Shechem, by Edward F. Campbell, Jr., and G. Ernest Wright ......................................................104

81

82

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

The Biblical Archaeologist is published quarterly (February, May, September, December) by the American Schools of Oriental Research. Its purpose is to meet the need for a readable, non-technical, yet thoroughly reliable account of archaeological discoveries as they relate to the Bible. Editor: Edward F. Campbell, Jr., with the assistance of Floyd V. Filson in New Testament matters. Editorial correspondence should be sent to the editor at 800 West Belden Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Editorial Board: W. F. Albright, Johns Hopkins University; G. Ernest Wright, Harvard University; Frank M. Cross, Jr., Harvard University; William G. Dever, Jerusalem. $3.00 per year, payable to the American Schools of Oriental Research, Subscriptions: 126 Inman Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139. Associate members of ASOR receive the journal automatically. Ten or more subscriptions for group use, mailed and billed to the same address, $2.00 per year apiece. Subscriptions run for the calendar year. In England: twenty-four shillings (24s.) per year, payable to B. H. Blackwell, Ltd., Broad Street, Oxford. Back numbers: $1.00 per issue and $3.75 per volume, from the ASOR office. Please make remittance with order. The journal is indexed in Art Index, Index to Religious Periodical Literature, and at the end of every fifth volume of the journal itself. Second-class postage PAID at Cambridge, Massachusetts and additional offices. Copyright by American Schools of Oriental Research, 1969. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, BY TRANSCRIPT PRINTING COMPANY PETERBOROUGH. N. H.

Bronze Age Buildings At The Shechem High Place: ASOR Excavations At Tananir ROBERT G. BOLING McCormick Theological

Seminary

During the last three weeks of October, 1968, the American School of Oriental Research re-excavateda Bronze age structure in the neighborhood called Tananir,' located on the lower slope of Mt. Gerizim, some 300 meters from ancient Shechem. The building was first described by G. Welter as part of his progressreport on the work of the German institute at Shechem.2 It was notable for its square plan (eighteen meters on a side), with square and rectangularrooms arrangedaround a central room or court. Within the latter were reported to be a platform or "altar"substructurein the southeast corner and a centrally placed stone pillar. Welter interpreted the pillar as a massebah. The southwest corner room enclosed a "plastered"cistern (see Figure 2, where Welter's plan is represented by dotted lines). To facilitate discussion we have assigned room numbers to the units of the building; these numbers appear in boxes, e.g., room 1 in the northwest corner. Architectural parallels for the Gerizim building were entirely lacking at the time of the German work, and the religious interpretationwas based largely, it seems, upon the interpretation of certain objects: "a fetish, incense stands,"'3"a stone idol, a phallus."4 For additional details the only 1. Arabic broken plural of tannur, "oven." The name is not commonly used today, as apparently it was only forty years ago. It is explained by older residents as referring to fireplaces on the mountainside, used formerly by Samaritans on their festival occasions. In bestowing such a name upon the neighborhood, the Samaritans perpetuated a very ancient activity at the nearby ruins. 2. G. Welter, Archiiologischer Anzeiger, III/IV (1932), 313f. 3. Ibid. 4. E. Sellin, Zeitschrift fiir die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, L (1932), 305f.

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

1969, 4)

'

\

v"

.....

83

"+

".-"

I•. ...

. ..

.-

"-'LL

By

e

W ls

A h

o

I'

I........

.

.. .. ...

to

s N1 SHWIG THELTINHI TWE TEXAVTON F 93 110 2 4 9 91 7 a 9 10 I ,

.

-C

S

Fig. 2.

MCF

A

E

M

Schematic plan of the Tananir sanctuary based upon Welter's 1931 plan and the 1968 excavations. The room numbers referred to in this article are indicated in squares. This and other plans were prepared by Oliver M. Unwin.

84

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

surviving source is a newspaper release by Miss B. D. Mazur, Welter's assistant for historical research. Fully half of the article is given over to "the recent discovery by Dr. Walter (sic) of the Temple Baal-berith." Mazur gives, apparently, the internal dimensions: a sixteen-meter square structure with an eight meter square central court. Near the altar were found tube-like incense burners, a few feet long and similar to those found in Babylonia and at Besan; libation bowl; oil lamp; and in the chambers huge pithos vases and alabastraof Egyptian importation.But most impressiveof all was the foundation deposit: resting in a corner of the foundation wall near the altar were a finely carved bronze sword and two spears. . . . The chronology of the temple is about the beginning of the Late Bronze Age 1500-1400. Evidence clearly points to its destruction by fire-a testimony of the piteous end of Abimelech's enemies (Judges 9:49).5 It is unfortunate in the extreme that no records of Welter's field work can be found; anything that remains of the "altar"is now under a modern house and there is no hint of the impressive "foundation deposit" in his Archaologischer Anzeiger paragraphs or in the report to the Department of Antiquities. None of the objects from the 1931 excavation can today be traced. In the complete absence of comparable temple architecture, and after a careful look at the Tananir pottery, Professor Albright interpreted the building as a patrician house of the late Middle Bronze age, in certain ways comparable to his famous Tell Beit Mirsim example.6 Albright was at that time bringing order out of chaos with the establishment of a reliable ceramic chronology for Palestine. However the question of the cultic character of the building might finally be settled, Welter's announcement, that at Tananir he had found the Late Bronze age temple destroyed by Abimelech, was clearly wrong. In 1956 there turned up what appeared to be the missing architectural link, with the discovery of a Late Bronze age temple impeding the progress of expansion at the Amman airport.7Like the Tananir building the square Amman temple consisted of rectangular rooms arranged around a square central court, having a centrally placed massebah. The building was situated a comparabledistance from any known settlement of the period. The only difference is that the dimensions of the Amman building were smaller. The striking similarity between the Tananir and Amman buildings has recently been discussed by G. R. H. Wright, chief architect of the current 5. B. D. Mazur, The Palestine Bulletin, June 5, 1932. Welter himself dated the destruction to the end of the MB II; see the full quotation in the article by Campbell and Wright below. 6. W. F. Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine (1954), pp. 91f., figs. 16 and 17. 7. Systematic excavation of the site in 1966, following preliminary salvage work by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, was conducted and promptly reported by J. B. Hennessy of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, in Palestine Exploration Quarterly, XCVIII (1966), 155-62.

1969, 4)

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

85

Joint Expedition to Balata (Shechem), who was understandably cautious because of the lack of data for relating Tananir's own architecturalunits.8 Because of a recent flurry of new construction in the neighborhood, where the panoramicsweep of the Shechem valley is unexcelled, Wright despaired of ever reclaiming sufficient data to justify re-excavation.However, a visit to the site in the summer of 1968, on a busman's holiday from Field XIII at Shechem, convinced us that we would have access to at least one-third of the building and that, in any case, we would uncover the southwest corner, where the one published plan indicated we might find undisturbed soil against the outside, which in turn would allow us to determine stratigraphy. Plans were developed for ASOR to go into the field in October. The Tananir dig was designed as an opportunity for archaeological collaboration, providing initial field experience for students and scholars related to a number of institutions. Area supervisors were ASOR Fellow James Charlesworthand HUCBAS Fellow Frank Benz, together with Icole Biblique students Margaret McKenna and Eduardo D'Olivera. Lee Ellenberger of the Joint Expedition provided his incomparablephotographic coverage, and the work of surveying and architectural recording was done by Oliver Unwin of the British School. Completion of his ulpan studies enabled ASOR Fellow John Ribar to join us for the last week and complete the excavation of a second MB structure. Mrs. Karin Rabkin, HUCBAS student, was registrar and became supervisor-at-large,as illness sidelined two of the staff early in the game. ASOR's Edward Tango was foreman and camp manager. ASOR Director Kermit Schoonover served throughout as project advisor and persistent administrator.We were quartered in the home of Selman Suleiman, Mukhtar of Balata, where we did our bookwork and, on costly total curfew days, formed two-penny pools anticipating the next burst of gunfire, the hour of the lifting of the curfew, etc. Thanks to the splendid spirit that dominated the staff from start to finish, we were able to fulfill our obligations to our Balata friends, and meet the central aims of the dig. The Site

Ellenberger's aerial photo (Fig. 1, looking SW) shows the excavated area narrowly hemmed in by two modern houses, a high rock outcrop uphill, trees above rapidly rising bedrock to the west, and a low rubble terrace wall downhill. Hidden from view are a pair of cisterns alongside the houses. The houses and cisterns cover one-half of Welter's building. At the outset four five-metersquares were placed alongside the cisterns, leaving one-meter balks and numbered from north to south. (See Fig. 4; area numbers are encircled on the plan, e.g., area 1 at the NE corner of 8. G. R. H. Wright, Zeitschrift fiir die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, LXXX (1968),

1-35.

86

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

:

!

:

i

hI

*-'i ...... :

\ -

-

cI

U

"

U,

-=

i

r

?)

;.0

.- .

-

:1:,

_

:--•

C

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

1969, 4)

87

SILO '11'

'

!~~~ .'•

ir??~

"2

'-

!

ft~ of

,

'

.'

".::?

-.

-r H ....

".-,,

.

...0

.....04,

.

?

\?? '?? "'

""~(; I

?

PLC .:2•. ",... ,

'•'."'........

'

. .

. ,

" ....

...

.... .. ..

rrr91 ?+,-tE ,I ::

--

STIEPS

010 c

?a ....

.

". ..so%%& , &94&

Fig. 4.

The 1968 plan of the sanctuary remains. Numbers in circles refer to the excavation areas.

the field). All were subsequently widened by half a meter on the east Area 4 was finally extended another three meters uphill. The biggest surprise to come from our search for pieces of the published building (our "Building A") was the discovery of another one, in part very much like it, one step down the slope. With the discovery of "Building B," area 1 was given a 1.5 meter square extension at the northeast corner. As an additional stratigraphicalcheck, the probe at the northeast corner was subsequently carried another 2.5 m. down the slope.

88

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

"Bedding plane" is the geologist's term for each layer in the stratified deposition of bedrock such as Gerizim's limestone. A glance at the northsouth Section (Fig. 3) will be enough to suggest how the configurationsof bedrock presented some of the most fascinating puzzles of the season. Figure 5 shows two fine rendered surfaces separatedby a low spur of bedrock.That the latter once supported a mud-brick wall (wall 7) was indicated by the angle of repose of bricks found to the west of it; these all belong to Building B. The inner terrace wall sits above a point where the bedding planes terminate, stepping downhill at ca. 45 degrees. Except for a recent intrusion at the east balk to obtain dirt for the adjacent garden terrace,the slope had not been excavated in modern times. The evidence is clear in Figure 5, where a dark continuous band of terra rossa is tagged (locus 2) in the balk. This is pre-1931 topsoil, the result of centuries of erosion down the slopes rounding off the rubble and depositing a thin skin of rich red dirt.

Fig. 5.

Areas 1 and 2, looking west. The bedrock spur, separating two fine rendered surfaces, is just to the right of the cat-walk or balk of earth left by the excavators; just to right of the spur, a white tag in the unexcavated earth marks the terra rossa blanket representing the undisturbed top-soil that collected over the ruins.

Everything above it is 1931-excavation dump, thrown back to form the present terrace. The presence of terra rossa 2 in area 1, breaking directly over the higher bedding plane and disappearing under the inner terrace wall, meant that we were outside anything that might survive from the published plan. The continuation of the terra rossa blanket into area 2 was even more disconcerting, but it meanlt that areas 5, 6, and 7 should be opened opposite 2, 3, and 4 respectively. With the appearance of the outside wall angling across area 6 it was possible to restrict area 7 to a four by five meter "square;"it was subsequently extended uphill for another three meters. To be sure that we caught all surviving traces of wall 502, area 5 was widened by one meter on the west. To be doubly sure that we were not missing the north wall of Welter's building, a one by five meter trench had been placed along the brink of the terraceand designated area 5a. With the discovery of Building B, area 5a was extended down the slope at a width of four meters. Thus developed the irregularoutline of the main field (Fig.

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

1969, 4)

89

4). By the time it had developed, I was sure that I understood a curious comment by Sellin, who remarks that the temple stood open to the north;9 that is, a long stretch of the north wall had disappearedin antiquity! Area 8 was our designation for a small circular wall described as incorporating a rock outcrop and enclosing a "place where a fetish stood, surrounded by numerous amphorae."'?The "fetish stone" was "the only one of its kind in Palestine" (Mazur). It was, to be sure, "outside"the big building, nearly a hundred meters to the west. A two by four meter area was begun, exposing a stretch of circular wall one course high, just below the surface, with rendered surfaces running against both faces and an ..WWI

"

ci

? 3,

.,,

.-,

: Ji-

a

dr .4w do,

";;s"ia

Fig. 6.

Area 8, where a small circular wall enclosed a place where Welter found what he called a fetish and a number of amphorae. The 1968 excavation was precluded from completing study of this installation.

abundance of pottery (MB to modern) churned together in the shallow backfill (Fig. 6). When we had learned just this much, the curfew was imposed. Latest

Remains

Area 9 was less than thirty meters to the west of Building A, centering in a rock-filled rectangular basin or vat cut out of bedrock, flanked by a long low rectangularplatform to the west. According to Nimer Dahood Salman, timekeeper for Welter, the latter had cleared inside the vat but had not dug around it. We removed the accumulation of forty years, cleared the surface around it, noted the shallow (settling basin?) depression in the bottom, a low bedrock shelf in one corner, hard burnished plaster on several surfaces, and weathered post holes on all four corners (Fig 7). This 9. Sellin, Zeitschrift fiir die alttestmentliche Wissenschaft, L. (1932), 10. Welter, Archiiologischer Anzeiger, III/IV (1932), 313f.

305f.

90

Fig. 7.

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

Late Roman or early Byzantine stone-cut vat in bedrock some 100 feet west of the sanctuary.

was preparatoryto stratigraphicalwork around it when suddenly the curfew redirectedsupervisorsin full force to the main site. Areas 8 and 9 were photographed, planned, and placed on the Tananir map. The area 9 vat installation could not have been dug with Bronze age tools, and it probably belongs to a period of flourishing activity at Tananir in late Roman and early Byzantine times. These later periods are well represented by sherds in topsoil and high subsoil loci and by other artifacts, among them an iron nail and bits of glass; the glass included pieces of two fine bracelets, several small bowls, and a "wine-glass"stem." All but one of 11. For the typological placement of these pieces I have appreciated invaluable observations of Mr. Dan Barag, who is preparing his Hebrew University dissertation on the glass of Late Roman and Early Byzantine times.

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

1969, 4)

91

c~

~'

r~

;

'I'`? ;LT~L~ ~C~'

r\ I? r ?' :r

`5)

i I

C~i ;IltlC~

c

r

r

~~ ~J,

,C

~

45. ~1

I.

~r~lrop~L1~~-~

r \

~ICiP~t~t~i

X'

??r ~lb

I?. ?-" ,~ ?c~r 't ??

,t

-$

*4?? -'

..

i44;??i'? L-,i

?It? ~je~i~,

r

r' r?

.?TTU.~'

r?? r

,r

?I ?,

?F?

c. i (O'

r

I 'kC~ ?vr; .?

..

~s*'

I

?

r

~ ?G'

L .,r?

?? ;t:

" I IIC ~?I! I Y

(C?:

?

"

~

-k~ ' ~,? i ')rr't

0? .' ( 5:?

r; .e

r :r

r Crt u ;%:r

:3

r

Fig. 8.

~? ;tris tL.

Overhead view,

~ee~T~~r.

taken from a tripod, of the remains of Building A.

the late Roman indicators were found in area 1 (the other in backfill from the German dump), together with a late first or 2nd century store jar and a dozen small tesserae. The Byzantine wine-glass stem came from area 7, as did fifty larger tesserae. These areas, for the most part unexcavated by Welter, suggest that the late Roman residency was situated on the down-

92

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

hill bedding planes; the Byzantine occupation moved uphill. In the 2nd century Gerizim was being adorned with monumental architecture all the way from Nablus to Tell er-Ras, and Tananir was probably the residence of a prosperouscitizen of the day. Evidence of this latest occupation, however, has mostly eroded down the slope, while parts of the large Bronze age building had been protected until 1931 by debris as much as two meters deep. The Roman residence at Tananir ended a gap of nearly 1500 years. With the revival of Shechem roughly a hundred years after the last MB II C destruction, the ruins at Tananir undoubtedly attractedvisitors from time

SC C1`'

'

i---• ?

l

?1

soo

Vb

--v

Fig. 9.

'w

Building A view from the down-hill (north) perspective. The meter stick rests where the wall-line between rooms 4 and 5 once ran; note the shaping of the bedrock along the west edge of room 5, just to the left of the meter stick. The "cupboard base-stone" appears at the edge of the wall-line, just in front of the meter stick.

to time, and someone may have had his home nearby, as indicated by a couple of Late Bronze age trumpet bases in cook-pot ware, picked up in pieces scattered wide in the backfill. Late Bronze representationis, however, extremely sparse; no bichrome ware, no Cypriote or Mycenean imports or their imitation, not one flanged-rimcook-pottamong 1648 registereditems. Building

A

It was with mixed feelings that we discovered how shallow was the backfill from 1931, the reason being that the site had lain open for three years with villagers unrestrained from dismantling ancient walls, before the owner built the modern terrace (Fig. 8)!

1969, 4)

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

93

The central pillar is somewhere serving a modern purpose; its foundation trench shows as a shallow half circle at the east balk, laboriouslychipped out of bedrock and the rock worn smooth. In precisely the same way the bedrock which underlies most of room 5 had been carefully levelled. While only snatches of the room's north wall (102) survive, the lines of the south and west walls are quite clear in the faces of higher bedrock which has been shaped with amazing precision for the line of levelling stones under walls 203 and 303 (see Fig. 9). The "altar"has been displaced by a modern cistern. The flight of four steps which Welter's plan shows descending into room 5 has disappeared; with removal of the balk and yellow bricky debris, their outline was clear in the red bedrock contrast with the rendered chalk floor. That is, the stairs were placed first, and then the chalk was hauled in, when the uphill rooms of Building A were constructed. The round and flat "cupboardbase-stone"at the midpoint of wall 203 is so labelled for its similarity to the much better preserved units in the Amman sanctuary, which, as at Tananir, appear exactly opposite the central pillar. The outside wall 502 (at the west) clearly shows two phases. Of the original (two stones wide) only the foundation course survives (Fig. 8). This was undetected by Welter who had cleared only the inner face. The foundation of 502 can, however, be correlated with two other features that Welter did not see or record. Wall 116 was found under the undug terra rossa blanket, and "sub-floorsilo" 114 had not been previously cleared (Fig. 2, room 2). The little stone circle contained a very broad MB II C repertoire of indicator sherds, including ten small vessels with rim diameter of fifteen centimeters or less. The reason that neither of these features (wall 116 and silo 114) appear on Welter's plan became clear finally from a study of the probepocked terra rossa blanket and relative bedrock levels in the northwest corner of Building A. Floor levels were in fact one of the most puzzling aspects of Welter's extremely precise and accurate plan, and it didn't take long to discover why. For example, Weliter shows no threshold between rooms 5 and 4; the charred cobbles (which may represent a "hearth"though oddly placed) in ro-om4 are at precisely the level of the carefully preparedbedrock in room 5. But south of the hearth, outcrops were permitted to protrude to ever higher levels in room 4 (Fig. 9). It is impossible to exaggerate the contrast between these two bedrock floors,the one tediously chipped and worn, the other altogether unworked. A comparable situation exists along the northern limit of the building. It is now clear that Welter had worked from within the building, exposing walls to foundation courses on one side. Beyond the surviving limits of walls

94

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

he had probed through the terra rossa blanket to bedrock. And he read correctly the information from his probes; as our work in areas 1 and 5a showed, there is one bedding plane step down where Welter shows a threshold or step between rooms 1 and 2. The difference is hidden by the undug balk between areas 1 and 5 but shows clearly in the 5a south balk (Fig. 11, upper left); from west to east the long bedding plane under room 2 rises gently, leaving one step up to room 3, if rooms 3 and 5 are at the same relative level. That is, Welter's plan across the north is a brilliant combination of the walls of the rebuild phase and the bedrock floor levels

1*1 'K -

~

---~.-

~

-

_

_

Fig. 10. A fine amethyst scarab (about 11/16" long), a copper needle (nearly 43/4 long) and the reconstructed fragments of an alabaster vase which was over six inches tall, from Building A.

of the original Building A. "Sub-floorsilo" 114 is misnamed. It belongs with wall 116 and the original 502, as a stone-walled bin built up from the bedrock floor of the original room 2. In the later phase the bin went out of use and was buried, together with the foundation course of 116, under makeup for higher floors. The October dig was thus able to verify in general and clarify in considerable detail the undocumented plan, which in turn has strengthened the comparison with the Amman building. Small object finds were not numerous, as was to be expected in the re-excavationof a site. They include a handful of bone buttons and stone disks, one bronze fragment, and a fine amethyst scarab, of a type generally regarded as Hyksos in date.12 Glimpses 12. Plain, and a little larger than the one previously published amethyst scarab (broken) from Balata (Tananir?). See A. Rowe, A Catalogue of Egyptian Scarabs (1936), p. 102, plate X, no. 421.

1969, 4)

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

95

of once finer appointments are given by two basalt bowl indicator pieces (one of them a huge imitation of the high ring-base ceramic form), and one small piece of ivory inlay. The two finest pieces are from foundation fills: a copper needle and the pieces of half an alabastervase (Fig. 10). Building A is crowded onto the higher bedding planes, with inconvenient access from the uphill side and oriented so as to incorporatea massive piece of upended bedrock in wall 502 and the wall of Welter's cistern, our Silo A. The latter was constructed by chinking up the gaps in an imposing crevasse and giving the pit a tamped chalk lining; it would not have been watertight.

Fig. 11. The southwest corner of Building B, where, on a chalk shelf, the destruction debris sealed crushed pottery which dates the building. Included was the significant small platter bowl pictured in Fig. 13 below. Note the plaster pier at right, which appears again in Fig. 12. Building

B

The rendered surfaces at the foot of the terrace (Fig. 5), apparently re-used in part by the late Roman occupants, were found to run under a massive destruction debris at the west edge of area 1. With the removal of the balk, this destruction debris was found to be breaking to both sides of wall 413 (Fig. 11). The careful placement of fine rectangularstones clearly earns 413 the distinction of being the finest surviving Tananir wall. It sits on chalk floor 6, which is built up west of the wall to form a rendered shelf (414). The shelf in turn is related to a brightly burnished plaster pier, broken and slightly askew but apparently found in situ, wedged into the

96

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

|i r-

V.G

..i

o

,

rr

.r

,

'I

-

tb

Fig. 12. The plastered pier in Building B, with the remains of wall 420, the western wall of Building B, above it. In the foreground, digging has proceeded into Silo B.

1969, 4)

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

97

cracks of the bedrock foundation of wall 420 (Fig 12). That wall 420 (above the pier in Fig. 12) is an exterior wall seemed clear from the higher bedrock exposed for another meter to the west. The collapse from these walls and from the higher bedding plane which they abut sealed a crush of pottery that included several store jars, a large ring-based krater, and the best specimen of the small bowls that abound in Building A and are present in all its foundation fills (Fig. 13). At least one person died in the conflagration, as indicated by a lower jaw, teeth, and other skeleton fragments sealed by the destruction debris.

Fig. 13. The miniature platter bowl from the destruction debris of Building B.

The collapse of Building B pulverized the rendered floor between walls 413 and 420 and it gradually settled over the centuries, due to continued compaction in a defunct pit, Silo B (Fig. 14). Stratificationwithin the pit disclosed several distinct phases of use, with a 1.5 meter accumulation of midden material at the bottom sealing two half-lamps, several crude bowl bases (like the previously mentioned miniature) and rims (another miniature), and a juglet base on the bedrock, representing the pit's earliest use for storage. The constructionof Silo B was strikingly similar to Silo A (small stones and chalk closing gaps on one side and building up the other), only better, with a nearly circular wall. The northern (downhill) limit of Building B is not clearly definable. Bedrock in the northern half of the area 1 probe is buried beneath a homogeneous brown dirt having an abundance of late Roman sherds mixed in it, to a depth of nearly a meter. This can only be interpreted as prepared fill thrown into an area previously cleared to bedrock. It runs to the top of "wall" 901, the latter being a crude alignment of smaller stones set into virgin soil at the brink of the higher bedding plane, and following its curvature across the narrow probe (see the plan and section, Figs. 3 and 4). This thin stump of wall may perhaps be interpreted as a piece of ancient terrace wall outside Building B; it is enough to suggest that Building B was long and narrow, oriented east-west.

98

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

,,

"

ObC~

4.,

'?r N,

C IV'1

46

0 46.

Aor91 ~ l C~l ALY

"

)7

Fig. 14. Silo B in the southwest corner of Building B, representing its earlier phase.

As indicatedabove,the terrarossablanketspillingdirectlyover the lips of beddingplanesaboveand below BuildingB meansthat all stratigraphical connectionswith BuildingA had long since washeddownthe mountainside. In this situationthe potterybecomesdoublyimportant,especiallythe cache

1969, 4)

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

99

of store jars from the final phase of Building B. The jars consistently represent the high-necked forms characteristicof MB II C. Yet they lack the more elaborately profiled and ridged rim features which multiply in the later phases of MB II C at Shechem and are quite common in the backfill debris on Building A. In addition to the store jars, two platter-bowlscame from foundation fills for Building A. One comes from a stretch of foundation trench for wall 502, from which the foundation stones had already been mined. But the foundation trench was picked up in his balk by area supervisorBenz (taking advantageof the peculiar late afternoon "balklight") and cleared the next day to produce a number of indicator forms including the pieces of this half bowl which almost gives the impression of being cut across its diameter. The form is standard MB II C but the ware is a crude one that is common at Tananir. The second platter-bowlwas found under the chalk and on the original bedrock floor of room 5. Platter-bowls with such straight, flaring rims become dominant in LB and at Tananir they account for 29% of all stratified platter-bowl rims. In general we may say that the pottery of Building A is consistently MB II C but not up to the best standards of the period. A number of forms which occur only in the last two MB II C phases at Shechem suggest that Building B was in ruins and Building A flourishing by the turn of the 16th century. Evidence for two waves of Egyptian retribution at Shechem, the first punitive (ca. 1550) and the second utterly devastating (ca. 1543) will correlate well with two phases of Biulding A, if the hasty rebuild on wall 502 is a safe indicator. There remains a large problem of architecturalcontinuity and transition, to be discussed next. Building

C ?

While the parallels between Tananir Building A and the Amman Building appear to be confirmed several times over, entirely new questions are posed by the contradictoryqualities within Building A and by its orientation so as to produce a plan on the south that is identical and parallel to the earlier (silo B) phases of Building B. Notice also that the architect of Building A simply ignored a sizable room area that had been previously chipped out of bedrock to the west of wall 502 (Fig. 15). This area was filled with extremely tight, rocky midden material (not "loose stones and terra rossa"as on the plan!) that had been packed in place to prop up the rebuild; presumably the space was used similarly in the original phase of the wall. How shall we comprehend this concern for orientation together with comparable workmanship in Building B and rooms 5 and 8, but contrasting qualities within Building A itself? My proposal is that "room 5" once had independent existence as a nine-meter square unit contemporary with the silo phase of Building B. With the destructionof the last silo-phase of Building B, the plaster-pier phase was built and the high side access to

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

100

"room 5" was maintained through a series of rooms reproducing the plan of the old Building B (that is, Silo A and rooms 8, 9, and 10). Around the turn of the 16th century, Building B (plaster-pier phase) was destroyed for the last time and new rooms were added to the large uphill complex. The result was Building A, phase 1. Such a hypothesis enables us to make sense of the frequency of late MB II C characteristicsin the 502 foundation pottery, which we noted above. Finally, the large Building A complex was partially destroyed and hastily rebuilt toward the very end of MB II C.

,

. -.

A. ,

"

w ?

,

. .

,

-

" .,

.

.,'.b-

.

,.

/•,/

?: r

""

i

?

. .

Uig. 15. Building A and the worked bedrock on its south and west sides, as viewed from Haj Abu Mohammed's housetop.

Summary

of Proposed

Architectural

Phases

I. Building B (Silo B phases) with contemporary Structure C ("room 5"); ca. 1650-1625. II. Building B (plaster-pier phase) with continued use of Structure C and new construction across the south (Silo A and rooms 8, 9, and 10); ca. 1625-1600. III. Building A (phase 1), clearly reflected in Wall 116, bin 114, and wall 502 foundation. Building B in ruins; ca. 1600-1550. IV. Building A (phase 2). Welter's structure; ca. 1550-1543.

1969, 4)

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

101

A close analogy for this history of architecture at Tananir is provided by Nahariyah, on the coast north of Haifa, which also flourished until the close of MB II C, accordingto the results of the most recent work there. At Nahariyah, situated even further than the Tananir and Amman airportbuildings from any contemporary settlement, the first long-roomed temple succeeded a small square structure which abutted a bamah ("high place"). The bamah was man-made, as might be expected on the level horizon of the coastal plain. When the long-roomed temple was built, the bamah was enlarged to have its center in the center of the former small square temple."3 It is also extremely important that religious observance at Nahariyah somehow involved the use of very small ceramic models of larger vessel forms.14 As at Nahariyah so at Tananir the reciprocal attraction between old open high place and new feast facility might well explain the crowding of Building A uphill, incorporatinga plot that was already holy. Building C, a nine-meter square structure contemporarywith Building B, must remain in the realm of a working hypothesis. There simply is not evidence to decide whether room 5, too wide to be spanned by a single beam, was originally or ever roofed. That the first October rain turned all our "plastered"floors to quagmires was, however, impressive evidence of a sort! Perhaps only the central pillar stood open to the sky, especially in the final, chalk floor, phase. Small depressionsin the bedrock to the north and south of the central foundation pit (visible in Fig. 8) might have served as postholes for a canopy arrangement. Room 5 was apparently the only means of access to the surroundingrooms;a shortageof lamps in the pottery counts suggests that there was no lack of natural light inside the building. Perhaps its use was seasonal and concentrated in daylight hours. It is worth noting that rafters at the level of the two long bedrock "platforms"flanking the high outcrop would have provided for a canopy or ceiling nearly ten feet high in room 5, leaving the outcrop itself projecting another 3.5 meters above the building (see Fig. 15). By far the most provocative artifactual evidence is provided by the small vessels showing a continuity from the earliest use of Silo B to the latest phase of Building A. Through the first four campaigns of the Joint Expedition to Balata, from the vast bulk of MB stratigraphydug and recorded, only five such under-sized bowls were observed, three of them from the temple area. Earliest

Traces

Apart from a handful of sherds showing burnishes characteristicof the earlier phases of MB II A and B, the earliest human activity at Tananir 13. M. i)othan, 14. I. Ben-Dor,

esp. plate VIII.

Israel Exploration of the Quarterly

Journal, VI Department

14-25. (1956), of Antiquities of

Palestine,

XIV

(1950),

1-40,

102

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

is represented by a handful of Chalcolithic-Early EB sherds: two handmade bases, one piece of thumb-impressedmolding, three body sherds (handmade) with the characteristicworn red finish on buff wares, and perhaps other examples with various incised decoration. Thus the earliest ceramic representationcorrelates well with the earliest occupation at Shechem, late Chalcolithic encampments on bedrock below the later temple. The handful of earliest sherds may be correlatedwith one rim fragment of a thin, fine-grainedbasalt bowl (Fig. 16), first spotted by D'Olivera for

Fig. 16. Rim fragment of a basalt bowl, recalling Chalcolithic forms known Palestine; note the grooved rim decoration.

elsewhere

in

its decoration strictly comparable to that of the spectacular cache of ten whole specimens (a number of them on high ring bases with windows, like the ceramic specimens from the Chalcolithic Necropolis at Hedeira), found by J. Perrot at Tell Abu Matar."5Perrot doubted that the bowls were finished locally. The striking similiarityof material and technique has been confirmed visually by the writer on a visit to the Beersheba Museum. Another example can be seen in the plates of bedrock material from Megiddo, "StratumXX," which also yields very precise comparisonsfor a number of Tananir flints.16 Flints account for twenty-seven of the fifty-three small objects registered at Tanair. This unusually high representationfrom our limited access to a previously excavated site surely requires another explanation than is 15. J. Perrot, Israel Exploration Journal, V (1955), n. 46. 16. G. Loud, Megiddo II, plate 262, 3.

77-79, plate

18a and b, and p. 181,

1969, 4)

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

103

provided by the brief MB II C span of architecturalremains. Flints were worth keeping in antiquity, while the bulk of the related pottery was scraped away with successive remodellings of huts and structures using the crudely cut angles and worn bedding planes below the uphill outcrop. Among the flinitswere three examples of the "Canaanean"technique (common throughout most of Early Bronze), four small sickle blades clearly reminiscent of the Ghassulian culture, and two points that appear to be Neolithic. Four times in a hundred

years

It is of course appropriateto ask "What is specifically religious about this earliest artifactual evidence?" To be sure, we know very little about the specifically religious aspects of transactions at any of the early high places. The suggestion that we have excavated an ancient festival center must stand the test of the history of religion in the Shechem vale. At the very least, we can say that the force of religious tradition offers a rationale for inconvenient high-side access to Building A, where activity flourished without water-tight cisterns to the end of its history. One could not enter Building A without pausing to turn before the uphill outcrop. Continuity of architectural tradition with Building B, on the other hand, indicates that descent into the depths of "room 5" had nothing necessarily to do with dark mysteries! If Jotham had gone all the way to "the top of Gerizim" he would have been invisible to the people of Shechem. Welter ventured the identification of Building A with the temple destroyed by Abimelech in Judges 9. While that identification is clearly out of the question, another sort of relationship is suggested by Jotham'sescape and his famous reinterpretationof the fable of the trees, from a vantage point on Gerizim. The narratorclearly attributes to Jotham something of the stature and modus operandi of the great charismatic judges and later prophets, scrupulously appealing to historical and legal precedent, delivering his Sovereign's indictment, and leaving the decision to the course of events. While Tananir traditions are obviously quite dead in the narrator'sday, there is every reason to think that they would have been very much alive in Jotham's. What better place to ascend for such a pronouncement, and have it remembered thus, than to the nearby ruins of another sanctuary, especially if it had served as a place for celebrating tribal relationships formed by religious covenant, in the collapse of which people had died? Viewed from such an angle, Jotham appears not as the one who predicts the collapse of Abimelech and the violated El-berith temple but as one who expounds upon the meaning of the rubble of Tananir.

104

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

Tribal League Shrines in Amman and Shechem' EDWARDF. CAMPBELL, JR. AND McCormick Theological

Seminary

G. ERNEST WRIGHT

and Harvard University

In BA, XVIII (1955), 80, Frank M. Cross, Jr., just returned from a summer with the Dead Sea Scrolls, reportedon the excavation of what appeared to be a temple at the Amman airport. While airport enlargement was under way, bulldozers had chanced upon a substantial building. Excavations were immediately begun by Muhammed Mustafa Salih, under the supervision of G. L. Harding, then director of the JordanianDepartment of Antiquities. No detailed plan of the building was published, but visitors to the Amman Museum were astonished at the wealth of imported material in the ruins of an isolated building of the Late Bronze age (ca. 1400-1200 B.C.) on the edge of the eastern desert. Nelson Glueck's surface surveys of Transjordan in the 1930's and 1940's had found no evidence of sedentary occupation between approximatelythe 19th century B.C. and the beginning of the Iron age.2 What, then, was the meaning of this building, with its evidence of comparativewealth and international trade, from the very middle of that chronological range? The archaeologicalarchitect, G. R. H. Wright, published a rough plan of the building, such as could be made from the surface, a decade after the original excavation. He noted that the building was square, that it was most assuredly a temple with a square "holy of holies" set at the heart of the larger square fixed by the outer walls. Between the outer and inner walls there was space wide enough to walk in. Architect Wright then compared the building to certain Persian and Nabatean temples which were also square and in which the most important rites must have consisted of ambulatory processions around the central cube which was clearly the focus of religious attention.3 In February, 1966, J. B. Hennessy of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem returned to the site for further clearance and excavation.4He reports that the temple foundations lie "some 300 meters to the south of the present civil airport Administration Buildings, in the junction of the taxying run from the civil apron and the first of the main runways." The plan of the building was a perfect square of ca. fifteen meters in its exterior measurements(see Figs. 17-18). The walls were placed on bedfrom an assigned topic in a Harvard Graduate Seminar and 1. This article draws its inspiration von der Recke. The interpretation from a paper written on the topic in that seminar by Wilhelm of the meaning of the building was originahy tnat of Frank M. Cross, Jr., and G. Ernest interpretations given below are to be blamed on Wright. The final Wright, tnough architectural section of the paper is largely from Campbell. 2. N. Glueck, The Other Side of the Jordan (1940), pp. 114-57. 352-57. LXXIX (1966), 3. G. R. H. Wright, Zeitschrift Wissenschaft, fiir die alttestamentliche 4. J. B. Hennessy, Palestine Exploration 155-62. Quarterly, XCVIII (1966),

THE BIBLICALARCIAOO()()(IST

1969, 4)

105

rockor on the naturalred soil immediatelyoverlyingit. The outsidewalls, 1.95 meterswide, were made up of huge stones up to two meterswide, packedaroundwith smallerstones.After the firstcoursewas in place, the builderspacked the entire area inside with a fill of yellow clay and red earth, probablyobtainedfrom the originaldigging of foundationtrenches for walls. In the fill, frequentpocketsof burntclay, ashes and bone were encountered,suggestingto the excavatorthat "a seriesof dedicationswere associatedwith the initial construction.. . . Some forty small gold objects, mostly jewelry, beads by the hundreds,scarabs,cylinder seals, bone and ivorypieces and rarerpotteryfragments"were encounteredin this earth.

go *

):A

4"

?00

Fig.

17. The air.

stone From

base for Palestine

the brick superstructure Exploration Quarterly,

of the XCVIII

Amman (1966),

temple, viewed P1. XXXII.A.

from

the

After the fill had been laid in, the builders erected the other walls. The internal plan consisted of the square sacred room, 6.50 meters wide, the corridorspace around it being broken up into six rooms of equal size (see Fig. 18). Squarely in the center of the sacred area is a flat-topped, round podium, consisting of onc roughly rounded stone set on top of another (see Fig. 19), the bottom one placed on bedrock. Since the top was charred, the podium is considered by the excavator to have served as an altar. How many courses of stone made up the original walls is unknown. They probably served only as the base for a brick superstructure. From

106

THE BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST

____ v!!I

!!

"

(Vol. XXXII,

LL

,

?-

)

,,.K ?,

,

Or,,

,o,1 cr?(C(

_

.

A A-

SECTION _ _

?

(~ ,,

... .

r., ;•.

J,,

4 V.

too

Ito

?r tk~ ooC

"~~ ...

~ ~ \\`

...

$I too

' ' :r:

t

o ,4

'? \I?;""•'

""'"LL'

go,Ilp

4e, .....

,

-

'

,,

I

?l 0of0p It too $8

I~I

IIc,,t~,

,tJ,

o

t.,

S

C_.

foe.f.at.0 age

I'sic

SCA,

C.

r

fo

so

Fig. 18. Plan of the Amman temple, prepared by Oliver M. Unwin for the British School expedition in 1966. From Palestine Exploration Quarterly, XCVIII (1966), 158, Fig. 2.

two to five centimeters (that is, less than two inches) of dark silt accumulated during what must have been a comparativelyshort period of use. Then the entire interior was paved. A final phase either during or after the build-

1969, 4)

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

107

ing's use as a temple is represented by a wall built acrossthe middle of the central room, creating two rooms which were then probably roofed (see Fig. 17). Excavation outside the building revealed no occupation surfaces. The site is isolated, with no evidence of a town in the vicinity. A wall creating a court around the temple probably once existed, but no evidence of it has been discovered. Imported Mycenean pottery from the Greek mainland in the foundation fill belonged mostly to Late Helladic pottery type IIIA, though some sherds belonged to pottery type II. This means that the temple was erected about 1400 B.C. or toward the end of the 15th century. The

-

.1

Fig. 19. The central stone pedestal in the sacred court of the Amman temple. From Palestine Exploration

Quarterly,

XCVIII

(1966),

P1. XXXIII.B.

latest material suggests that the building ceased to be used during the course of the 13th century. G. R. H. Wright, in the article cited above, calls attention to the similarity of the Amman temple to a building excavated in 1931 by Gabriel Welter on a shoulder of Mt. Gerizim (at Tananir) over the site of ancient Shechem. Until Dr. Boling's re-excavationwhich is reported above in this issue of BA, we knew little about this building except for its outline plan (Fig. 20) and the following brief description by its excavator: On the slope of a spur of Mount Gerizim, situated directly behind the village of Baldta, a sanctuarywas uncovered in 1931. A building which had originally a square plan (measuring 18 by 18 meters) was discovered under a layer of fallen mud bricks 2 meters thick. It

108

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

consistsof a centralroom,9 by 9 meters,with a circularbasein the center,and the remainsof an altarin a corner,builtof largestones. The chambers groupedaroundthe centralroomwereclearlystorage rooms,to judgefromthe storagevesselsfoundin them.A cornerroom containsa cistern.The roomslyingtowardthe mountainsideareon a higherlevel, Entrancecouldbe gainedfrom the mountainside by of eightsteps,whichleadsintoa smallante-chammeansof a stairway and thence,by anotherstairwayof four steps,into the central ber, whetherthiscentralroomwas room.It cannotbe statedwithcertainty The is as an opencourtyard. it to be considered or whether covered, a that it was ratherlargealtarmakesit moreprobable In courtyard.

SP

-I

IT-A f

Fig. 20. The Welter plan of the Gerizim temple, from 0G, R. H Wright's presentation in 355, Fig. 3. Zeitschrifs fi4r die Alttestamentlilhe Wissonschaft, LXXVIII (1966),

this case the base would not have servedfor a pillar,but ratherfor a fetish, Outside the sanctuary,near rock protrudingfrom the ground, there was a small area measuring2 squaremeters,enclosedby a low wall, in the center of which stood a fetish surroundedby numerous amphorae.The sanctuaryshows one period only, and seems to have been in use only for a shorttime, as the scantyfindsshow. It was destroyedby fire at the end of the Middle Bronzeage." It is difficult to tell from this descriptionjust what is meant by the "fetish"surroundedby jarsoutsidethe building.What is clear,however,is that the inside dimensionsof the inner squarearea are almost precisely twice those of the Ammantemple.The measurements suggestthat the in5. English translation in the files of the British Department of Antiquities in Palestine (housed in the Palestine Archaeological Museum, Jerusalem) of Welter's report "Balata-Shechem (1928, 1929, 1931)," repeated in Archiiologische Anzeiger, 1932, III/IV, col. 314.

1969, 4)

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

109

ner roomof the Gerizimbuildingwas twentyordinarycubits square,while the corresponding roomat the Ammanairportwas ten cubitssquare. the size of the Geriziminner roomis much too large to Furthermore, allow it to have been roofed.By implication,therefore,the one at Amman was originallyunroofedalso. We can statewith comparative assurancethat both buildings consistsof roomsbuilt arounda sacredcourt., They are, accordingly,one type of the generalclassof courtyardtemples;the existence of such a class was postulatedby G. E. Wright in 1962 as the explanation for the structuresbeneaththe forecourtof the greattempleof the Covenant God (El-Berit) at Shechem.7 What is the meaningof the roundstone pedestalplacedsquarelyin the centerof the court?Hennessycalls it an "altar"and speaksof its top surface as being "charred." Since, accordingto the plan, the top is not more than ca. 65 to 75 centimeters(two feet) in diameter,nothing much could have been burnedon it except incense. Any majorfamily or tribalsacrifices would have been preparedas communionmeals outside the building. Welter as quotedaboveclaimedthat the base would not have been for an architectural support,but for a "fetish."Sellin explainsthat the base in the Gerizimtemple was 67 centimetersin diameter,and that Welterbelieved its purposeto be to supporta sacredpillar (massebah).We would suppose that the "altar"in the cornerof the Gerizimroomwas not for offerings, but presumablyfor the statueor statuesof deity or deities worshipped,or else for votive gifts. In one of the side chambersthere was, writes Sellin, carvedfromstone such as has "a stone idol, a phallus,so characteristically not been found beforein Palestine.It is 40 centimetershigh and 20 centimeterswide. Not far away from it was found a bronze spearheadof 30 centimeterslength and two bronzeknives,possiblyvotivegifts."' In the earliestphase of Temenos4 (the 901 phase) on the Shechem tell there were two courtyardsof approximately the same size, One had a row of pillarssupportinga roof over a part of one court. Roughlyin the centerof each courtwas what appearedto be a solidly placedcolumnsupport.These cannothave been the basesfor roof supports;if the areaswere to have been covered,there would have to have been rows of pillarsdown the centerof the spaces,just as there are at one end of one of the courts (see Fig. 21). 6. G. R. H. Wright is correct in noting that European scholars have generally followed Welter in assuming the Gerizim building to be a temple (see his article, p. 356), whereas W. F. Alve seen the building as a villa, comparable bright, followed by G. E. Wright among others, to those being built by Nablus and Balata residents in the same area now (see most recently G. E. Wright, Shechem [1965], p. 29). That the building was indeed a temple is now clear from the close parallel at Amman and from the central round base which has no structural function and must be assumed to have had a sacred character. 7. Shechem, Chap. 7 and BASOR, No. 169 (Feb., 1963), pp. 17f. The Shechem courtyard temples date from Middle Bronze IIB (ca. 1750-1650 B.C.). We are enabled to date the Gerizim building now to the immediately subsequent period; see Dr. Boling's article above in this issue. 8. E. Eellin, Zeitschrift fiir die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, L. (1932), 302-8; translation by S. H. Horn for the American Shechem expedition.

110

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII, 943 (Fortress

Temple phase)

GREAT

I

I

EARTHEN

I

FORTIFICATIO

SSilo

I

9

I

I Entrance?

"

L

90 4

Roofed oo oo

5

o o

-

3

I

2

SMALL 1

I Eou COURT

o

z

nW

-COURT Fortr (

C1i I IL 00-

1

oA

(,Lcter)

GREAT COURT

phase") at Tell Balata Fig. 21. An interpretation of the earliest phase of Temenos 4 ("901 (ancient Shechem). Note the two small courts with central stone pedestalsis which could early 17th have had no architectural significance (in rooms 2 and 6). The date century. Drawings by Guy van Swearingen.

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

1969, 4)

111

Since the conception of covenant played such a major constitutive role in the history of Shechem, explaining surely the later sacred stones (massebot) of the temple of the Covenant God, the 1962 interpretationof these courtyard temples saw these bases as pedestals of sacred pillars, perhaps commemoratingimportant convenants in the city's history during the 18th century B.C.9 To return now to the isolated small square temples on Mt. Gerizim's slopes and at the Amman airport, what purpose can they have served? Apparently, the people who worshipped at them did not live close by; certainly the presumption must be in the case of the Amman temple that those to whom it belonged were nomads or semi-nomads who followed their flocks to grazing places and planted crops during the late fall or winter for spring harvest. One would expect their temple to have been near the area of their spring crops. Now, as Pedersen has shown, people of this type and of the type of the Hebrew patriarchs, lived and moved and had their being in covenants.'0 Where a central governing authority did not exist, clans and tribes managed to preserve a reasonably peaceful existence by means of covenants. It is not an unreasonable assumption, therefore, that the Amman temand ple, probably the Gerizim temple also, served a group of tribes in covenant with one another in a manner comparableto the role played by Shiloh for a certain time during the period of Israel's Judges. The central shrine and its rites of worship were the visible sign of, and testimony to, the existing covenant." It was there that rites of covenant renewal were periodically conducted and where inter-tribaldisputes and other matters of communal policy were settled "before the Lord." If this is true, then it may not be out of place to suggest with Welter that the round pedestals in the middle of the temple courts were for the purpose we have suggested for the ones in the Shechem courtyard temples, namely as supports for sacred pillars. That is, they were to commemorate,to serve as witnesses of a covenant which held tribes together in peaceful relations. The fire-scarredsurface of the podium at Amman could well have come from a destruction of the building or from a later time when the sacred room was divided and used as a dwelling. G. R. H. Wright has suggested that in type these square temples belong to the same class as those square temples which have so long a history in Mesopotamia.12 Figure 22 is the plan of one attached to the palace of king Gimil-Sin of Eshnunna (Tell Asmar). The resemblance is indeed 9. So G. E. Wright, Shechem, pp. 118f. and Fig. 71; cf. also pp. 123-38. 10. J. Pedersen, Israel, I-II (1926), 29ff., and 263ff. 11. Cf.

M.

Noth,

Das

Israel (trans., 1966), 12. Zeitschrift

System

der zwdlf

Stiimme

Israels

esp. Chaps. II and IV.

fiir die alttestamentliche

Wissenschaft,

LXXX

(1930), (1968),

and

H.-J.

9-16.

Kraus,

Worship

in

112

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

striking, but there is one very important difference which should be noted. While the form may be related, the function differs. The cult room, or holy of holies is not the court itself but a side room off the court. In Figure 22, the podium for the deity's statue is in a niche in the rear room. In Figures 18 and 20, on the other hand, the focus of religious attention is the central object on the pedestals in the center of the court.

C,

eo

0 0 1020

10 20 I 40

60

80

METIES FEET 30

Fig. 22. Plan of the palace and temple of Gimil-Sin at Eshnunna in Iraq from about 2000 B.C. From H. Frankfort, The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient (Penguin Books, 1954), p. 52, Fig. 19. Tribal Leagues

in Jordan?

Gradually there is emerging a clearer picture of tribal organization in the regions east of the Jordan, both north to Mesopotamia and south into the Arabian desert, but we are far from certainty about the details as yet. The evidence is mainly literary,and it clusters around two poles: the existence of groupings of clans and tribes, very often six or twelve in number, apparently having some relation to a shrine; and the employment of a range of terms describing aspects of tribal organization which link other West Semitic tribal structures to Israelite tribal structure. Only a brief summation of the evidence can be given here.

1969, 4)

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

113

It was the late Professor Martin Noth who gave full play to the observation that Israel's earliest existence as an entity in Palestine took the form of a loose confederacy, comparable in several ways to the Greek amphictyonies ("communitiesof those who dwell around") belonging to the first millennium B.C. Crucial to Noth's description in his Das System der zwalf Stamme Israels (1930) and in sections 7 and 8 of his The History of Israel (1959) were the roles played by the central sanctuaryand by the vital number twelve. Acceptance of the main outline of Noth's thesis has been all but universal, and the whole picture has been enhanced by W. Hallo's recent demonstrationthat a twelve-partorganizationof Sumerian cities serviced the temples at Nippur during the Third Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2060-1950 B.C.).'3 It is inescapable that the number twelve is a critical indicator of a particular organization, and it is highly probable that that number related to monthly care for that sanctuary which at any given time served as the center of the league's attention. By the same token, the number six could have related to a system in which each participatingunit took a two-monthhitch of service. Heinrich Ewald, a century ago, caught the importance of the numbers six and twelve for early Israel, especially when he noted that outside Israel the same numbers were important.14The evidence comes from lists of tribes in the form of genealogies embedded in various parts of the Genesis narrative. These lists are difficult to treat from a critical standpoint, but all indications are that they contain old and trustworthy information about tribal orappearas children stemming from Abraganizations. Twelve Aramean ,tribes ham's "brother"Nahor in 22:20-24, eight from his wife Milcah and four from his concubine Reumah. Reumah's offspring appear to have wandered the farthest from the home base around Haran in the great bend of the upper Euphrates, and to have settled between Qatna and Hazor, just north and a little east of Palestine proper.15Twelve Ishmaelite descendants appear in 25:12-16, whose distribution is in northwest Arabia, perhaps extending far enough north to touch the southern edge of the Aramean tribes' territory. Genesis 36 is a very complex chapter, but one traditional unit, in verses 1014, presents twelve descendants of Esau in what may well be an Edomite confederacy. (To get twelve here, one must leave out Amalek in verse 12 as an addition and then count the youngest generation in each line; this recalls the way Ephraim and Manasseh are counted in place of Joseph to replenish the necessary number twelve in Israel after Levi is no longer reckoned. By removing Amalek again and by counting Korah only once, one can bring the quite differently stated material in verses 15-19 into conform13. Journal of Cuneiform Studies, XIV (1960), 88-96. Opposition to the amphictyonic hypothesis comes from H. M. Orlinsky, most recently in Oriens Antiquus, I (1962), 11-20; but see now G. E. Wright, The Old Testament and Theology (1969), pp. 127f., n. 12. 14. The History of Israel, I (trans., 1869), pp. 362ff. 15. A. Malamat, XVe rencontre assyriologique internationale: la civilisation de Mari (Les cogrds et colloques de l'universit, de Lidge) (1967), pp. 129ff.

114

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

ity with 10-14, but there is some peril 'to such a procedure.) The Edomite territoryapparentlyextended along the east side of the Dead Sea and around into the Negeb. Less certain as a tribal grouping with the traditionalproper number is the Horite group in 36:20-30; the number of tribes here is seven unless one follows the proposalto eliminate Dishon as a duplicate of Dishan. More compelling is the group of six sons of Keturah and Abrahamin 25:2; the names here point to the interior of the Arabian peninsula and extend from thence northward.16 Now Israelite tradition remembered these heterogeneous details for some good reason, and for some good reason the numbers six and twelve are prominent. It seems likely that, like Israel herself, these tribal groupings were confederacies held together by covenants, quite possibly having the responsibility for the care of a central sanctuary and a similar concern for maintaining internal order and mutual protection. Let it be admitted clearly that the anchor for such an argument is the picture of Israel herself afforded us in the reportsof her pre-monarchicperiod. The terminologyin these tribal lists points just as directly to a similarity of organization.In Genesis 25:16, for example, appear these words: "These are the sons of Ishmael and these are their names, in their villages and in their encampments, twelve princes accordingto their tribal units." The term prince here is the exceedingly common designation in the Priestly tradition's description of the religious organizationfor the heads of the Israelite tribes. Here as in many other instances, the Priestly traditionis probablyemploying terminology with a long tradition behind it. Abraham Malamat has proposed convincingly that the terms villages and tribal units in this verse belong to a special set of West Semitic vocabularyhaving technical reference to aspects of semi-nomadic life." His source for comparison is the Mari corpus from the late 18th century B.C., where the cognate terms have similar meanings. To get an idea of the precise meaning of the first of these terms, one can note Leviticus 25:31, where it is clear that these villages are unwalled settlements, and Joshua 19:8 where they are near large cities. Clearly, the old terminologyfrom the time of the Israeliteconfederacyis also the terminology of the old lists of related eastern tribal groupings. Malamat has brought together more terms from Mari and the Old Testament to portray patterns of tribal organizationwhich we shall not rehearse here. Suffice it to say that the Mari material and the Hebrew terms both point to a time of transition from semi-nomadicexistence to a more settled life, and one gets a glimpse of the last stages of tribal structuregiving way to the three 16. E. A. Speiser, The Anchor Bible: Genesis (1964), p. 187. Were one to eliminate than like clan of professions "sons" of Dedan in verse 3, which look more like designations and here Nabdeel), adds (Raguel names and insert in their place the two names the Septuagint on all this, see W. F. names! For background Gen. 25:1-4 would be found to have twelve pp. 1-12. und Altes Testament (the Festchrift for Albrecht Alt) (1953), Albright in Geschichte 143-50. 17. A. Malamat, Journal of the American Oriental Society, LXXXII (1962),

1969, 4)

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST

115

nationhoodin both periods,Mari in the 18th-17thcenturiesand the region aroundPalestinein the 13th-12thcenturies. As a final example,we turn to the term alluph, used to designatethe Edomitechiefs in Genesis36:15-30and in otherpassages.The termappears in Exodus15:15 as a partof the victorysong now recognizedas one of the oldest poems in the Old Testament.s In this verse, the alluphs of Edom of Moab (RSV: "leaders"),which is still anare paralleledby the "rams" otherdesignationfor the triballeaders.The wordalluph mustbe relatedto a termfrom the sameverbalrootwhich appearsfrequentlyin the reportsof the earlyperiodof Israel,namelythe wordeleph designatinga clan and then a militaryunit.19the same term comes to mean "a thousand"in Hebrew and is regularlyso translated,but thereis no doubtthat this is a laterderivation at best;the prophetMicah,who was thoroughlyfamiliarwith a whole rangeof old amphictyonictermsand concepts,knew the old meaningwhen he used the word in 5:2: "... amongthe clans of Judah."Here againan etymologicalconnectionsuggestsa conceptualconnectionbetweenIsraeland Edomas far as theirancientperiodsare concerned. Evidencefor Arabictribalconfederacyalso comesfromquite a different quarter,much laterin the chronologicalspreadof the Old Testament.The Assyrianking Ashurbanipal,whose reign coversthe middleyearsof the 7th centuryB.C., reportstwo campaignsagainstArabtribes(texts in J. B. Pritchard,ed., Ancient Near EasternTexts, pp. 297-301). In the annals of of the these campaigns,one finds severalreferencesto a "confederation" god Atarsamain,and two referencesto a confederationaround a certain Abiate',son of Te'ri, who was a king of Qedar.The annalsdo not permit determinationof the numberof groupsinvolvedin the confederation,but the tribal/territorial namesgiven recallGenesis25:13-16,wherethe sons of Ishmaelare named.Qedaritself is one such name, and anotheris Nabaiati (Nebaioth). Indeed, these two names appeartogetherin Isaiah 60:7 and Qedarappearsin a numberof prophetictextsfromthe late 7th centuryand throughoutthe sixth (e.g., Jer. 2:10, 49:28; Ezek. 27:21; Isa. 42:11). If our theory of the early existenceof tribalconfederaciesin Transjordanis sound, here is evidence that this institutioncontinuedfor nearly a millennium, preservingthe featureof organizationaroundthe cult of a god. The readerwill have seen that the evidencesareindirectso far,but they are clearlypresentand point in a cleardirection.Tribalorganizationin the areaeastof the Jordanwas at manyplacessimilarto the confederacy of Israel. we evidence Amman sancthe where the lack for Unfortunately, very area tuaryhas been found. About the early historyof Ammoniteterritorywe 18. F. M. Cross, Jr. and D. M. Freedman, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, XIV (1953), 237-50. 19. On the entire issue, see G. E. Mendenhall, Journal of Biblical Literature, LXXVII (1958), 52-66.

116

THE BIBLICALARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. XXXII,

know all too little; the Rephaim, Zamzummim and Zuzim of Genesis 14:5 and Deuteronomy 2:20 remain enigmatic and shadowy.20As we have noted, Nelson Glueck's Transjordanianexplorations drew almost a complete blank on settlements belonging to the period from about 1850 to 1250 B.C. Excavation in Amman proper and at Heshbon will probablyend by introducingone or two permanent settlements into the picture, but the period still presents itself as primarily one of semi-nomadic peoples without permanent settlements. The emergent hypothesis is that there were leagues of tribes throughout the desert fringe from the Euphrates to the Arabian peninsula; that they were structured by covenant not unlike Israel of the pre-monarchicperiod; and that sanctuariesat certain central points, probablyrather hard for us to pinpoint now, served as the focus of the religious undergirdingof the tribal union, quite possibly symbolized by the witness pillars or massebah. A tantalizing prospect is the challenge to locate and excavate more such centers from Haran to Teima, as the picture continues to develop, perhaps to shift, certainly to clarify. 20. G. Landes, BA, XXIV (1961), (1964), pp. 69-88.

65-86,

esp. the early pages; reprinted in BA Reader, 2