Genesis: Abraham's Odyssey, Part 2

The View from Nebo: How Archeology Is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East
by Amy Dockser Marcus

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Yaniv professes to be uninterested in politics, and he gave an interview to a French newspaper after the Abraham movie was shown at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. In the interview the reporter described him as an atheist. Members of the Islamic movement in the Jordanian parliament cited the interview during a debate calling for the Jordanian film company that participated in the project to back out of the coproduction deal and the plans to translate the film into Arabic in order to widely distribute it in the Arab world. Since then, Yaniv has been reluctant to try to characterize his religious views. Today he admits he is not certain whether Abraham really lived. But after working on the film, he came to the conclusion that answering that question didn't matter, and could produce no fruitful avenue of scholarly inquiry. "If Abraham was historical or he wasn't historical is really no longer relevant," says Yaniv. "The important fact is that Abraham lives today."

Abraham lives, but it still remains extraordinarily difficult to determine conclusively the origins of such an ancient religious figure based on archaeological evidence. In 1975, around the same time of the Ebla discoveries and the publication of the books questioning the patriarchal narratives, two American professors, R. Thomas Schaub and Dr. Walter Rast, led an expedition to the southeastern section of the Dead Sea in Jordan in the hope of finding the lost cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. These are probably two of the most famous biblical cities, destroyed by God because of the hedonism and abominations of the people living there. Abraham's nephew Lot lives there, and Abraham pleads with God to spare the cities if ten righteous men can be found. God saves Lot, largely on the strength of his kinship tie to Abraham, but decides to destroy the cities. "Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities....And Abraham went early in the morning where he had stood before the Lord and he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace," the Bible says in Genesis 19.

Over the course of the next fifteen years, Schaub and Rast out-lasted all the academic disputes, managing to excavate and identify over thirty sites, from walled towns to huge cemeteries, dating from the earliest historical period through the Islamic era. The two cities that they speculate might be Sodom and Gomorrah are Bab edh-Dhra', the largest of the towns that grew up along the southeastern shore of the Dead Sea, and its neighbor, Numeira.

Both date to the Early Bronze Age, around 3300-2100 b.c.e. This dating places them far earlier than the traditionally accepted time period for when Abraham might have lived. At an earlier time, the archaeologists probably would have insisted that despite the chronological discrepancy, the sites were the Bible's Sodom and Gomorrah. In fact, in their report about the early work at the sites, Schaub and Rast had made just such an argument. Over the years they tempered their initial enthusiasm and became much more cautious about drawing conclusions.

The digs at Bab edh-Dhra' and Numeira offered an unprecedented look at the life and demise of villages thousands of years ago. The two had similar layouts, and both were built on top of hills overlooking the sea, close to freshwater sources. Although Bab edh-Dhra' had already been inhabited for a thousand years, it wasn't until the Early Bronze Age period that its citizens began burying their dead in tombs in a cemetery located at its outskirts. The cemetery has been the source of some of the richest finds, with many objects found surrounding the bones, including pots, clay figurines and beads, wooden tools, and food offerings. Most of the skeletons that have been unearthed there are incomplete, and archaeologists have speculated that the deceased were buried elsewhere at the time of their death, then brought to Bab edh-Dhra's cemetery for reburial in what was probably a family or clan tomb. At first the cemetery was used only seasonally, probably by nomads who came to take advantage of the water there and buried any that had died during their trips. But the settlement nearby gradually developed into a permanent village. The residents built simple homes from mud bricks atop stone foundations. These structures were the first indication to archaeologists that there was eventually a continual presence at the site. A variety of crops were raised there, including wheat, barley, grapes, olives, lentils, and chickpeas. Bone remains indicate that there were also sheep and goats, lizards, donkeys, and camels. Then, around 2350 B.C.E., the city came to a sudden and violent end. No one is certain what precipitated the community's demise - it could have been an earthquake, a military attack from outsiders, or some sort of natural disaster or plague. The Numeira site contained even more dramatic evidence of destruction. The archaeologists found thick ash layers all around the city, burned roof timbers, and walls that had collapsed. There were even freshly picked grapes with their skins still intact. These had been carbonized by the conflagration that destroyed the town, and helped establish that it had come to an end in the late summer or early autumn. The doorways in Numeira were blocked with stones, which was interpreted as possible evidence that its inhabitants might have anticipated some kind of earthquake or natural disaster and evacuated, perhaps expecting to return at a later date. Indeed most of the homes had none of the small items that are typically found at a dig, such as jewelry, and no human remains were located in the debris. There was nothing in the sites themselves that might conclusively link them to the biblical traditions, but Schaub points out that Bab edh-Dhra' and Numeira had not been inhabited again after they were destroyed. The ruins were right there on the surface. "People passing by could have seen it, the desolation would have been evident to all," says Schaub. He says it is not hard to imagine the kind of history the Bible's authors could infer from such dramatic wreckage. The valley must have seemed cursed by God. The tradition of Sodom and Gomorrah "probably does go back to some historical event," says Schaub. "But at this stage we will never know what it was."

Still, in the shadow of this doubt, some progress is slowly being made. David Ilan, an archaeologist who digs at Tel Dan, a huge site that sits on the border of modern Israel and Lebanon, specializes in the Middle Bronze Age. He calls this period "the dawn of internationalism" in the Middle East, because it marks the first time when encountering a stranger outside one's tent was the normal course of events. People were on the move in great waves throughout the region, and their mobility led to the creation of intricate trading networks that stretched from one city to another. Throughout Tel Dan, there was evidence that people who came from cities in Mesopotamia, including Abraham's birthplace, Ur, really did have an important impact on both the settlement pattern and the character of the area.

During a tour he gave me of the Jerusalem-based Skirball Museum, which houses artifacts from a number of important digs in Israel, Ilan pointed to a replica of the Tel Dan mud-brick gate, the only complete Bronze Age arched structure that has survived intact in the southern Levant. According to Ilan's research, the gate hadn't been used for very long, and apparently had been filled in intentionally with soil soon after its construction. The reason for its abandonment was clear: evidence revealed that soon after its completion the gate had started falling apart. Its north tower began to detach from the base, and an attempt to put up a stone buttress as a support for the collapsing mud bricks had failed. Inside the gate the damage was even worse, as the earthern rampart collapsed into the street leading to the town. Every time it rained, mud and debris would break off and pile up in the main passageway. "If Abraham came riding through that gate on his donkey, he would have had to detour a huge pile of debris." Ilan laughed. He speculated that the townspeople had probably tried to clear the debris away initially but eventually conceded defeat to the elements and filled in the whole structure before building another gate at a different site in the city. In fact, archaeologists had found a stone gate just a short distance from the mud-brick one.

The question that concerned Ilan was the reason for the failure of the gate. "Didn't its engineers realize that in an area that receives relatively large amounts of rain, that gate was going to collapse?" he asked. It puzzled him too that they hadn't used local stone and timber, in ample supply in the surrounding countryside, an oversight that was especially glaring given that these materials had been employed successfully in constructing stone gates during the same time periods at nearby sites like Megiddo and Hazor. Ilan's explanation for these anomalies was that the engineers came from Mesopotamia. "Mud brick was really the only material easily available in Mesopotamia," he explained. "The same kind of vaulting technique at Dan was commonly used in places like Ur for spanning gateways, where precipitation was much lower than in northern Canaan. The architects at Dan simply maladapted the technique they knew from home to this region. Once they saw it wasn't working, they quickly abandoned it." Ilan made his way around the museum's display cases, past stone coffins, pottery, and other material. Following the finds from Dan was like traveling along the trail the migrants from Mesopotamia had taken into Canaan, bringing their own habits and customs with them as they moved. At Dan and in a small number of northern Canaanite cities, they introduced new burial practices that supplemented traditional practices. Studies of human skeletal remains from the period also showed significant changes in the demographics of the cities that could not be explained by environmental or evolutionary factors, but indicated that new groups of people had lived and died there. At Dan, Ilan and some of his colleagues had also unearthed a particular kind of painted pottery whose style and technique seemed to originate far to the north.

The new research has led to other tantalizing clues about the Middle Bronze Age. In the few cuneiform tablets found dating from this period in Palestine, including in Hebron, are names believed to be of Hurrian origin - the Hurrians were a shadowy ethnic group that dominated northern Mesopotamia and parts of Syria and Anatolia during the second millennium B.C.E. - yet another indication that northern groups mixed with the local population. Other archaeologists are examining food remains, like those of a legume called the Spanish vetchling, consumed in the Aegean but not native to the eastern Mediterranean or to the Near East. The legume contains toxins that can cause paralysis and nerve disorders if not removed through cooking before it is consumed. The people who brought the plant to Canaan or ate it, the archaeologists argue, would have had to know about this preventive treatment. None of this explains how or why immigration took place, Ilan points out, or confirms the historical accuracy of Abraham's journey. But in archaeology's ability to suggest the history of forgotten cities and nomadic peoples, the biblical record is slowly being transformed.

In this past lie the beginnings of the modern political conflict. According to the account in Genesis, it was in Hebron that Abraham was living, across the Dead Sea from his nephew Lot, when his wife Sarah died at the age of 127. Abraham goes to speak to the towns-people about buying a burial place, having already set his eye on the cave of Machpelah (known in English as the Cave of the Patriarchs), at the end of a field owned by Ephron, who is described as a Hittite who lives in the city. Ephron first offers to give the cave and land to Abraham, then states a price when Abraham insists. The price is steep, 400 shekels of silver, but Abraham weighs out the coins and takes possession of not only the cave but the entire field. Eventually he will be buried here too, by his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, in one of the few recorded acts that they perform together.

It is hard to imagine this event occurring in modern Hebron, where some of the most extremist elements on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict live. In 1929 Arabs in Hebron turned on their Jewish neighbors during nationalistic riots and massacred 67 Jewish inhabitants, many of whom they had known all their lives. In a small museum set up by the current Jewish residents of Hebron, there are photographs showing a woman's cut-off hand and people with gashes in their backs. The city's Muslim community has its own suffering and memorials stemming from the 1994 massacre by Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli Jew who burst into the Cave of the Patriarchs during prayers in Ramadan, Islam's holiest month, and shot and killed at least 29 men worshipping there, wounding about 150 others. Since then, the sanctuary to Abraham's memory has been divided by a wall, and the Israeli soldiers who control the site have set up a more stringent praying schedule so that the two sides are never together.

Hebron's history has emerged largely through the efforts of an Israeli archaeologist named Avi Ofer, and it turns out that Hebron has always been a city of radicals, a refuge for those who disdain compromise. As part of his graduate work in archaeology in the early 1980s, Ofer had begun the most comprehensive and important survey yet conducted of the entire Judean highlands area, about 800 square kilometers of territory comprising the heartland of Judah (including Hebron) and extending all the way down to Beersheba in the south. The survey had involved combing the hills, collecting pottery shards, and examining the remains of houses and other architecture in the hope of creating a settlement history of the area through every possible historical period, starting in the fourth millennium B.C.E. and ending in the Ottoman age directly before the founding of the modern state of Israel. As an outgrowth of that work, Ofer decided to spend several years digging at Hebron. He was interested mainly in the biblical period there, the Bronze and Iron Ages, particularly the city's association with the patriarchs and its role as King David's capital for seven years before David conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites and moved the center of his growing kingdom there. Ofer's preliminary investigation indicated that during these periods Hebron was a key center in the area for trading and commerce, but perhaps more interesting, that it had always been a self-contained community, distinct socially, economically, and politically from Judah's larger centers like Jerusalem, even when it was formally considered a subdistrict.

Despite Hebron's historical significance, it wasn't easy for Ofer to obtain funds to dig there. Hebron had been a political hot spot since shortly after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which had left Jordan's West Bank in Israel's control. A group of Jewish settlers had moved into a hotel in its downtown area, ostensibly to spend Passover in the city of the patriarchs. But after the holiday they refused to leave, and eventually the government backed down from a confrontation and approved the establishment of a small Jewish settlement there. When Ofer began his excavations, political tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were even worse than usual, eventually culminating in the 1987 outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, against Israel's continued military presence.

Ofer was finally able to get the financial support he needed to dig largely due to a political stroke of fortune. The Jewish settlers of Hebron had recently decided to expand their foothold there and set up a neighborhood in Tel Romeideh, a hilly section of the city. Ofer's investigations confirmed that Tel Romeideh was the center of biblical Hebron, and so he, along with his advisers and colleagues, the prominent Israeli archaeologists Benjamin Mazar and Moshe Kochavi, approached the minister of defense-at that time, Yitzhak Rabin -and argued that they urgently needed funding to dig before the settlers established an entire neighborhood on the mound and destroyed the archaeological materials located below. In fact, temporary caravans had already been set up on a small section of the mound, and Ofer was ultimately never able to excavate there. But with the 20,000 shekels Rabin authorized for the dig, Ofer was able to study other areas of Tel Romeideh.

Copyright © 2000 by Amy Dockser Marcus

About the Author

Amy Dockser Marcus joined the Wall Street Journal in 1988 and from 1991 to 1998 was based in Tel Aviv as the newspaper's Middle East correspondent. She is currently a senior special writer in the Journal's Boston bureau.