Sheba

26
THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE
Joshua’s era. He suggested the biblical account had confused Ai with
neighboring Beitin. Kathleen Kenyon excavated the ruins of Jericho for six
years. Finding no evidence to support the biblical references, she refused to
speculate, but concluded that Jericho had been deserted from the beginning
of the fifteenth century to the eleventh century B.C.E. and had fallen long
before Joshua. Later she gave her opinion on Old Testament archaeological
evidence as a whole:
The united Kingdom of Israel had a life span of only three quarters of a
century. It was the only time in which the Jews were an important
political power in western Asia. Its glories are triumphantly recorded in
the Bible, and the recollections of this profoundly affected Jewish
thoughts and aspirations. Yet the archaeological evidence for the period
is meager in the extreme. 1
The Old Testament states that King Solomon fortified Gezer, Hazor, and
Megiddo. Israeli politician-archaeologist Yigael Yadin was not as cautious
as Kenyon. When he discovered a gate at Hazor, constructed ca. tenth
century B.C.E., and another at Megiddo, he linked both to a third
discovered earlier at Gezer and claimed all three were the work of Solomon,
although evidence showed they belonged to different periods. James
Pritchard, writing in 1972, was forthright about Megiddo’s links with
Solomon: “No inscription names him and no specific find can be definitely
related to any biblical reference.” Later he stated:
The so-called cities of Megiddo, Gezer, Hazor – all said to have been
built by Solomon – Gibeon, the site of Solomon’s holocausts, and
Jerusalem itself, were in reality more like villages and surrounded by
circumambulatory ramparts of roughly hewn stone. Within were
relatively small public buildings and frequently poorly constructed
dwellings with clay floors. ... compared with the culture ... of Phoenicia,
Assyria and Egypt, the “magnificence” of the Age of Solomon is
parochial and decidedly lackluster.
The Old Testament links the city of Hebron - thirty kilometers south of
Jerusalem in Palestine - with the patriarch Abraham, and states David had
chosen it as his first capital. In the 1980s Avi Ofer of the Institute of
Archaeology of Tel Aviv carried out excavations in Hebron. Ofer
concluded that Hebron was founded ca. 3300 B.C.E. and, that by ca. 1950
B.C.E., it had grown into a major urban center. It had a king, a central
religious and political district, city walls, a literate bureaucracy, buildings