The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (29 page)

The site of Samaria is, even today, impressive. Located in the midst of gently rolling hills, planted with olive and almond orchards, it overlooks a rich agricultural region. The discovery of some pottery sherds, a few walls, and a group of rock-cut installations indicated that it was already inhabited before the arrival of Omri; there seems to have been a small, poor Israelite village or a farm there in the eleventh and tenth centuries
BCE
. This may perhaps be the inheritance of Shemer, the original owner of the property mentioned in
1
Kings
16
:
24
. In any case, with the arrival of Omri and his court around
880
BCE
, the farm buildings were leveled and an opulent palace with auxiliary buildings for servants and court personnel arose on the summit of the hill.

Figure
21
: A Proto-Aeolic capital.
Courtesy of the Israel Exploration Society.

Samaria was apparently conceived from the start as the personal capital of the Omride dynasty. It was the most grandiose architectural manifestation of the rule of Omri and Ahab (
Figure
20
:
1,
p.
179
). Located on a small hilltop, however, it was not the ideal place for a vast royal compound. The builders’ solution to this problem—a daring innovation in Iron Age Israel—was to carry out massive earthmoving operations to create a huge, artificial platform on the summit of the hill. An enormous wall (constructed of linked rooms, or casemates) was build around the hill, framing the summit and the upper slopes in a large rectangular enclosure. When that retaining wall was completed, construction gangs filled its interior with thousands of tons of earth hauled from the vicinity.

The scale of this project was enormous. The earthen fill packed behind the supporting wall was, in some places, almost twenty feet deep. That was probably why the enclosure wall surrounding and supporting the palace complex was built in the casemate technique: the casemate chambers (which were also filled with earth) were designed to relieve the immense pressure of the fill. A royal acropolis of five acres was thus created. This huge stone and earth construction can be compared in audacity and extravagance (though perhaps not in size) only to the work that Herod the
Great carried out almost a millennium later on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Rising on one side of this artificial platform was an exceptionally large and beautiful palace, which in scale and grandeur rivaled the contemporary palaces of the states in northern Syria. Although the Omride palace at Samaria has been only partially excavated, enough of its plan has been uncovered to recognize that the central building alone covered an area of approximately half an acre. With its outer walls built entirely of finely hewn and closely fitted ashlar stones, it is the largest and most beautiful Iron Age building ever excavated in Israel. Even the architectural ornamentation was exceptional. Stone capitals of a unique early style, called Proto-Aeolic (because of the resemblance to the later Greek Aeolic style), were found in the rubble of later centuries’ accumulations (
Figure
21
). These ornate stone capitals probably adorned the monumental outer gate to the compound, or perhaps an elaborate entrance into the main palace itself. Of the interior furnishings little remained except for a number of intricately carved ivory plaques, probably dating from the eighth century
BCE
and bearing Syro-Phoenician and Egyptian motifs. These ivories, used as inlays on the palace furniture, might explain the allusion in
1
Kings
22
:
39
to the ivory house that Ahab reportedly built.

Figure
22
: The eighth century
BCE
at Megiddo. The six-chambered gate (ascribed by Yadin to a “Solomonic” level) most probably belongs to this stratum.
Courtesy Prof. David Ussishkin, Tel Aviv University.

Several administrative buildings surrounded the palace, but most of the enclosure was left open. The simple houses of the people of Samaria apparently clustered on the slopes beneath the acropolis. For visitors, traders, and official emissaries arriving at Samaria, the visual impression of the Omrides’ royal city must have been stunning. Its elevated platform and huge, elaborate palace bespoke wealth, power, and prestige.

Samaria was only the beginning of the discovery of Omride grandeur. Megiddo came next. In the mid-
1920
s, the University of Chicago team uncovered an Iron Age palace built of beautifully dressed ashlar blocks. The first director of the Oriental Institute excavations at Megiddo, Clarence S. Fisher, had also worked at Samaria and was immediately impressed by the similarity of construction. He was supported in this observation by John Crowfoot, the leader of the Joint Expedition to Samaria, who suggested that the similarity of building techniques and overall plan at Samaria and Megiddo indicated that both were built under Omride patronage. But this matter of architectural similarity was not fully pursued for many decades. The members of the University of Chicago team were more interested in the glory of Solomon than in the wicked Omrides. They ignored the similarity of the Megiddo and Samaria building styles and dated the complexes of pillared buildings (presumably stables) in the succeeding stratum to the days of the united monarchy. In the early
1960
s, when Yigael Yadin of the Hebrew University came to Megiddo, he dated the Megiddo palaces—the one excavated in the
1920
s and one he himself uncovered—to the time of Solomon and linked the later level containing the stables and other structures to the era of the Omrides.

That city was certainly impressive (
Figure
22
). It was surrounded by a massive fortification and, according to Yadin, furnished with a large four-chambered city gate (built directly on top of the earlier “Solomonic” gate). The most dominant features inside the city were the two sets of pillared buildings that had long before been identified as stables. Yet Yadin did not link them to the biblical descriptions of Solomon’s great chariot army but
to that of Ahab, noted in the Shalmaneser inscription. Yet as we will see, Yadin had not correctly identified Ahab’s city; those stables probably belonged to another, even later Israelite king.

The northern city of Hazor, which Yadin excavated in the
1950
s and
1960
s, provided additional apparent evidence of Omride splendor. Hazor was also surrounded by a massive fortification. In the center of that city Yadin uncovered a pillared building somewhat similar in form to the Megiddo stables, divided into three long aisles by rows of stone pillars. But this structure contained no stone troughs for feeding, so it was accordingly interpreted as a royal storehouse. An imposing citadel was uncovered on the eastern, narrow tip of the mound, enclosed by the massive city wall.

Another important site connected with the Omrides is the city of Dan in the far north at the headwaters of the Jordan River. We have already cited the opening lines of the stele erected at Dan by Hazael, king of Aram-Damascus, noting that the Omrides had previously taken that area from the Arameans. The excavations at Dan, directed by Abraham Biran, of the Hebrew Union College, uncovered massive Iron Age fortifications, a huge, elaborate city gate, and a sanctuary with a high place. This large podium, measuring about sixty feet on a side, and built of beautifully dressed ashlar stones, has been dated with the city’s other monumental structures to the time of the Omrides.

Yet perhaps the most impressive engineering achievements initially linked to the Omrides are the enormous underground water tunnels cut through the bedrock beneath the cities of Megiddo and Hazor. These tunnels provided the city’s inhabitants with secure access to drinking water even in times of siege. In the ancient Near East this was a critical challenge, for while important cities were surrounded by elaborate fortifications to allow them to withstand an attack or siege by even the most determined enemy, they seldom had a source of freshwater within their city walls. The inhabitants could always collect rainwater in cisterns, but this would not be sufficient when a siege extended through the hot, rainless months of summer—especially if the population of the city had swelled with refugees.

Since most ancient cities were located near springs, the challenge was to devise safe access to them. The rock-cut water tunnels at Hazor and Megiddo are among the most elaborate solutions to this problem. At Hazor, a large vertical shaft was cut through the remains of earlier cities into the solid rock below. Because of its enormous depth, of almost a hundred feet, support walls had to be constructed to prevent collapse. Broad steps led to the bottom, where a sloping tunnel, some eighty feet long, led into a pool-like rock-cut chamber into which groundwater seeped. One can only imagine a procession of water bearers threading their way single-file down the stairs and the length of the subterranean tunnel to fill their jars in the dark cavern and returning up to the streets of the besieged city with water to keep its people alive.

Figure
23
: A cross-section of the Megiddo water system

The Megiddo water system (
Figure
23
) consisted of a somewhat simpler shaft, over a hundred feet in depth, cut through the earlier remains to bedrock. From there it led to a horizontal tunnel, more than two hundred feet long, wide and high enough for a few people to walk at the same time, which led to a natural spring cave on the edge of the mound. The entrance to the cave from outside was blocked and camouflaged. Yadin dated both the Megiddo and Hazor water systems to the time of the Omrides. He proposed to connect the Israelite skill of hewing water systems to a section in the Mesha stele where the Moabite king recounted how he dug a water reservoir in his own capital city with the help of Israelite prisoners of war. It was obvious that the construction of such monumental installations required an enormous investment and efficient state organization—and a high level of technical skill. From a functional point of view, Iron Age engineers could perhaps have reached a similar result with a much smaller investment by simply digging a well into the water table under the mound.
But the visual impressiveness of these great water installations certainly enhanced the prestige of the royal authority that commissioned them.

Even though early and mid-twentieth century archaeologists assigned many magnificent building projects to the Omrides, the period of their rule over the kingdom of Israel was never seen as a particularly formative moment in biblical history. Colorful, yes. Vivid, to be sure. But in purely historical terms, the story of the Omrides—of Ahab and Jezebel—seemed to be spelled out in quite adequate detail in the Bible, with supporting information from Assyrian, Moabite, and Aramean texts. There seemed to be so many more intriguing historical questions to be answered by excavation and further research: the precise process of the Israelite settlement; the political crystallization of the monarchy under David and Solomon; or even the underlying causes of the eventual Assyrian and Babylonian conquests in the land of Israel. Omride archaeology was usually considered just a sidelight on the main agenda of biblical archaeology, given less attention than the Solomonic period.