1. Robert Giles: Four-Room houses at Avaris prove Hyksos were
Hebrews/Israelites, and not slaves
The
city of Avaris was the capital of the Hyksos domain in the north of Egypt;
it was excavated by Egyptologist Manfred Bietak. Robert Giles wrote to me:
“Nov. 2006. Concrete physical evidence that the Hyksos were Hebrews.The
orthogonal structures of the Hyksos [at Avaris, in the Bronze Age] is {sic}
the same as the Israelite four-room homes in the Iron Age. This proves that
the Hyksos were Hebrews and later Israelites. The idea that the Hebrew-Hyksos
were slaves has no merit. Josephus was right when he said the Hyksos were
the ancestors of the Israelites. The so-called exodus of the Israelites from
Egypt was actually when the Hebrews were expelled from Egypt, around 1550
B.C.E.
Respectfully,
Robert Giles.
_____________________________________________
2. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman:
“Exodus” was expulsion from Avaris
On
the Rise and Fall of the Hyksos in northern Egypt, Archaeologists Israel
Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman wrote in their book The
Bible Unearthed, The Free Press, New York, 2001: {p. 55} The most
important dig has been undertaken by Manfred Bietak, of the University of
Vienna, at Tell ed-Daba, a site in the eastern delta identified as Avaris,
the Hyksos capital (Figure 6, p. 58). Excavations there show a gradual
increase of Canaanite influence in the styles of pottery, architecture, and
tombs from around 1800 BCE. By the time of the Fifteenth Dynasty, some 150
years later, the culture of the site, which eventually became a huge city,
was overwhelmingly Canaanite. ...
But
there is an even more telling parallel between the saga of the Hyksos and
the biblical story of the Israelites in Egypt, despite their drastic
difference in tone. Manetho describes how the Hyksos invasion of Egypt was
finally brought to an end by a virtuous Egyptian king who attacked and
defeated the Hyksos, "killing many of them and pursuing the remainder
to the frontiers of Syria." In fact, Manetho suggested that after the
Hyksos were driven from Egypt, they founded the city of Jerusalem and
constructed a temple there. Far more trustworthy is an Egyptian source of
the {p. 56} sixteenth century BCE that recounts the exploits of Pharaoh
Ahmose, of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who sacked Avaris and chased the remnants
of the Hyksos to their main citadel in southern Canaan - Sharuhen, near Gaza
- which he stormed after a long siege. And indeed, around the middle of the
sixteenth century BCE, Tell ed-Daba was abandoned, marking the sudden end of
Canaanite influence there.
So,
independent archaeological and historical sources tell of migrations of
Semites from Canaan to Egypt, and of Egyptians forcibly expelling them. This
basic outline of immigration and violent return to Canaan is parallel to the
biblical account of Exodus. Two key questions remain: First, who were these
Semitic immigrants? And second, how does the date of their sojourn in Egypt
square with biblical chronology?
{p.
58} Was a Mass Exodus Even Possible in the Time of Ramesses II? We now know
that the solution to the problem of the Exodus is not as simple as lining up
dates and kings. The expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt in 1570 BCE ushered
in a period when the Egyptians became extremely wary of incursions into
their lands by outsiders. And the negative impact of the memories of the
Hyksos symbolizes a state of mind that is also to be seen in the
archaeological remains. Only in recent years has it become clear {p. 59}
that from the time of the New Kingdom onward, beginning after the expulsion
of the Hyksos, the Egyptians tightened their control over the flow of
immigrants from Canaan into the delta. ...
The
border between Canaan and Egypt was thus closely controlled. If a great mass
of fleeing Israelites had passed through the border fortifications of the
pharaonic regime, a record should exist. Yet in the abundant Egyptian
sources describing the time of the New Kingdom in general and the thirteenth
century in particular, there is no reference to the Israelites, not even a
single clue. We know of nomadic groups from Edom who entered
{p.
60} Egypt from the desert. The Merneptah stele refers to Israel as a group
of people already living in Canaan. But we have no clue, not even a single
word, about early Israelites in Egypt: neither in monumental inscriptions on
walls of temples, nor in tomb inscriptions, nor in papyri. Israel is absent
- as a possible foe of Egypt, as a friend, or as an enslaved nation. And
there are simply no finds in Egypt that can be directly associated with the
notion of a distinct foreign ethnic group (as opposed to a concentration of
migrant workers from many places) living in a distinct area of the eastern
delta, as implied by the biblical account of the children of Israel living
together in the Land of Goshen (Genesis 47:27).
There
is something more: the escape of more than a tiny group from Egyptian
control at the time of Ramesses II seems highly unlikely, as is the crossing
of the desert and entry into Canaan. In the thirteenth century, Egypt was at
the peak of its authority - the dominant power in the world.” More at:
http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/archaeology-bible.html.
________________________________________________
3. Walter Mattfeld on Bietak findings re Avaris Four-Room houses [ANE]
Bietak's 12th Century BCE Exodus, Walter R. Mattfeld mattfeld12@charter.net
Mon, 8 Sep
2003
As
Albright proposed that Israel's enslavement began under Ahmose I with the
expulsion of the Hyksos and Bietak proposed an Exodus no earlier than the
mid-12th century BCE based on a 4-room house he identified as possibly
Israelite, and as a peiod of approximately 400 years elapsed between Ahmose
I and Ramesses IV, I thought I ought to do some more "research" on
the 4-room house.
The
thought "crossed my mind" that if Israel was in Egypt for 400
years, ca. 1540-1140 BCE and her ancestors were of Northern Syria and Trans-Eruphrates,
that pehaps they kept alive the tradition of the 4-room house which Bietak
identified as North Syrian and Mesopotamian going back to the 4th millennium
BCE. Sad to say, my search drew a "negative" !
Bietak
discusses in some depth the "Mittlesaalhaus" in his monogram on
Avaris. He notes it is an Asiatic design and first appears during late
Dynasty 12, noting it appears in Syria and Mesopotamia as early as the 4th
millennium BCE. The problem? His excavations reveal that the Asiatics
eventually acculturated and assimilated to some degree Egyptian ways, and
ABANDONED the building of the "Mittlesaalhaus," that is, they
began copying the floorplans of Egyptian houses, of the
"Middle-class" type. Soo, "goodbye" sweet notion that
Israel "might" have preserved for 400 years the Mittlesaalhaus, to
introduce it to Iron I Canaan and the Hill Country ! For the details cf.
Manfred Bietak. _Avaris, The Capital of the Hyksos, Recent Excavations at
Tell el-Daba. London. The British Museum Press. 1996 and pp. 10 and 49
Bietak:
"According to Eigner, the layout of the houses resembles closely both
the "Mittlesaalhaus" (fig. 8) and the "Breitraumhaus- ancient
architectural types which occur in northern Syria in the second half of the
fourth millennium BC. A "Mittlesaalhaus" was also an element of
the palace of Mari (fig. 9). (p.10. Bietak)
"On
the other hand, foreign house types were no longer used. The house plans, as
noted were of purely Egyptian type." (p.49. Bietak) Bietak's proposal
of course was NOT that Israel's captivity began under Ahmose I, that's
Albright's notion. Bietak in his B.A.R. article suggests that Israel entered
Egypt in the Iron I period either as captives of Ramesses II or wandered in
with their herds about the same time (cf. pp.46-47. Manfred Bietak.
"Israelites Found in Egypt, Four-room House Identified in MEDINET HABU."
pp.41-49, 82-83. _Biblical Archaeological Review_. Sept/Oct 2003. Vol 29.
No. 5)
https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2003-September/010346.html
____________________________________________________________________________
4. Manfred Bietak – Summary: Four-Room house &
possible exodus of 12th century B.C.E.
In
the following article, Bietak is not talking about Avaris or the Hyksos -
they were gone long before the Ramesses kings.
He’s
talking about some rude makeshift huts whose design reminds him of the
Four-Room houses; but he comments that “Similarly constructed huts can
still be found in Egypt even today.”
The
evidence for a Hebrew/Israelite presence there in the 12th century B.C.E. is
scant, but he considers the possibility of an “exodus” around that time.
He comments, “if an Exodus (a flight of a group of proto-Israelite slaves)
occurred, the order of the Biblical tradition should be reversed. First came
the Israelite settlement of Canaan, which had already begun before their
sojourn in Egypt. Otherwise they would not have demanded to return to this
region after leaving Egypt. Second came their time in Egypt. Third came the
Exodus from Egypt. ...”
Israelites Found in Egypt. Four-Room House Identified
in MEDINET HABU Manfred Bietak
http://www.bib-arch.org/bswb
BAR/bswbba2905f2.html
Reed
huts more than 3,000 years old belonging to workers—perhaps slaves—and
with the same floor plan as ancient Israelite four-room houses have been
identified at MEDINET HABU, opposite Luxor in Egypt. ... Similarly
constructed huts can still be found in Egypt even today. ...
A
four-room house consists of three parallel long rooms separated by two walls
or rows of columns, plus a broad room across one end. Often the rooms are
subdivided, and sometimes subsidiary rooms are added. The central long room
is thought to have been a roofless courtyard, often separated from one of
the adjoining rooms by a row of columns. The four-room house is the
predominant type of domestic building in Palestine during the entire Iron
Age (1200-586 B.C.E.). In other words, it made its initial appearance when
the Israelites began to settle perceptibly in Canaan in Iron Age I and
continued to be the most popular house-type during Iron Age II. After the
Babylonian destruction of 586 B.C.E., it entirely disappeared. The
house-type endured for more than 600 years.
In
scholarly circles today, the four-room house is often called the
“Israelite house” because it is ubiquitous in the Israelite period and
at Israelite sites, with only a few appearances elsewhere. The late Yigal
Shiloh called the four-room house “an original Israelite concept.”5 Two
Israeli archaeologists recently concluded in these pages that “the
four-room house may safely be called the Israelite house.”* I am not so
sure. First, there is a very old prototype from Mesopotamia and Syria,
called the “Mittelsaal Haus” (middle-room house), which goes back to the
fourth millennium B.C.E. Second, the four-room house can also be found
outside the settlement area of the proto-Israelites. Perhaps, as has been
suggested, the exceptions can be accounted for as belonging to Israelites
living for relatively short periods in non-Israelite areas. On the other
hand, some of the earliest four-room houses, at Tel Masos in the Negev, have
been ascribed to the Amalekites,6 although the excavators claim the
settlement is Israelite. At two sites suggested to be Philistine (Tel Qasile,
stratum X, and Tel Sera‘#146;=Tell esh-Shari‘#146;a, stratum VII),
four-room houses have been excavated, but they date to the end of Iron Age I
(1000 B.C.E.) at the earliest and probably to Iron Age II. Apparently, if
Philistines built four-room houses, they did not do so until some time after
their settlement on Palestine’s southern coastal plain. Most of the
four-room houses are from Israelite settlements. Even if all early four-room
houses are not necessarily Israelite, the early or proto-Israelites were
surely among their main inhabitants. ... On this basis, the
workmen—perhaps slaves—employed to demolish the Temple of Ay and
Horemheb in the late 12th century B.C.E. could have been early Israelites,
although we cannot prove it with absolute certainty. Ramesses III campaigned
against Sea Peoples (including Philistines), as well as Shosu Bedouin, and
brought them back as prisoners of war. ... If proto-Israelites were in Egypt
at this time, as the reed huts by the Temple of Ay and Horemheb suggest,
they must have been close to Egypt prior to this time. It seems highly
likely that to some extent they had already settled in Canaan or in its
immediate neighborhood, and later were either deported to Egypt by force, or
migrated toward Egypt in order to keep their flocks alive (as the Bible
suggests). This reasoning would imply that if an Exodus (a flight of a group
of proto-Israelite slaves)11 occurred, the order of the Biblical tradition
should be reversed.
First
came the Israelite settlement of Canaan, which had already begun before
their sojourn in Egypt. Otherwise they would not have demanded to return to
this region after leaving Egypt. Second came their time in Egypt. Third came
the Exodus from Egypt. ...
____________________________________________________
5. Manfred Bietak – Detail: Four-Room house &
possible exodus of 12th century B.C.E. Israelites Found in Egypt. Four-Room
House Identified in MEDINET HABU
http://www.bib-arch.org/bswb
BAR/bswbba2905f2.html
The
history behind the biblical tradition of Israel in Egypt has always excited
scholars and laymen alike. The subject may seem somewhat worn out, however,
especially in view of the current “minimalist” tendencies in
scholarship. I do not claim to be a Bible scholar myself—I am an
Egyptologist. But sometimes an outsider can shed new light on an important
subject. I hope that will be the case here.
Reed
huts more than 3,000 years old belonging to workers—perhaps slaves—and
with the same floor plan as ancient Israelite four-room houses have been
identified at MEDINET HABU, opposite Luxor in Egypt.1
These reed huts may represent extra-Biblical evidence of Israel in
Egypt.
If
true, Israelite—or proto-Israelite—workers were in Egypt in the second
half of the 12th century B.C.E., more than a half century later than has
previously been thought. This evidence, in turn, would have important
implications for the historicity of the Biblical narrative.
Our
story begins in the 1930s on the west bank of the Nile, where the University
of Chicago’s Oriental Institute was carrying out excavations at MEDINET
HABU, the area at the southern end of the Theban necropolis. The most
conspicuous standing monument at MEDINET HABU is the so-called “House of a
Million Years,” a memorial temple of Ramesses III (c. 1184-1153 B.C.E.),
but numerous other temples pepper the site, designed for worship of the
state gods connected to the Pharaoh’s divinity and his mortuary cult. One
of these is the Temple of Ay and Horemheb. Ay (1327-1323 B.C.E.) was an
important figure in the court of Akhenaten, the heretic king who tried to
limit Egyptian worship to the single god Aten. Ay also played a leading role
in the court of Akhenaten’s successors, especially Tutankhamun
(c.1336-1327 B.C.E.); Ay may have figured prominently in Tutankhamun’s
rejection of the Aten heresy and the restoration of the cults of all the
other gods. In any event, on Tutankhamun’s death, Ay became the ruler of
Egypt, even though he was not born into the main royal line. And Ay promptly
began the construction of a memorial temple for himself at MEDINET HABU.
Ay’s
reign lasted only three years—not long enough to complete his temple. He
was succeeded by Horemheb, who was not of royal blood. Horemheb started out
as a mere scribe and, after a successful military career, rose to the top
rank. When Ay died, Horemheb assumed the throne. He was the last ruler of
the XVIIIth Dynasty.
During
his reign, Horemheb usurped the not-yet-finished memorial temple of Ay.
(That is why it is called the Temple of Ay and Horemheb.) At the time of
Ay’s death, only the temple rooms and some subsidiary buildings had been
completed. The decoration, however, was of the very highest artistic
quality. Extraordinarily fine relief carvings—of which, unfortunately,
only fragments have survived—lined the walls. The temple was also
embellished with fine statuary, including colossal seated figures of Ay
himself. The courts in front of the temple, however, were completed only by
Horemheb, who enclosed the temple in a magnificent colonnade of
papyrus-cluster columns and reconstructed the forecourts with three imposing
sets of pylons. In addition, he was careful to obliterate all references to
Ay, simply replacing them with his own name. It was this temple of Ay and
Horemheb that was excavated by the Oriental Institute in the 1930s.
In
the course of this excavation, the archaeologists discovered evidence of
some rude makeshift huts, whose dates I shall discuss later. The evidence
for the huts consisted of narrow trenches chiseled out of the bedrock, from
6 to 8 inches wide and only 4 to 8 inches deep. In these small trenches were
postholes, apparently for wooden poles or reed bundles bound together with
ropes to be used as posts. The trenches and postholes still held evidence of
the mortar or plaster used to secure the posts and the reed-walls. At two
spots, postholes were found in pairs at ends of trenches, showing breaks.
Here doorposts could be reconstructed. The excavators interpreted all this
as evidence of workers’ huts, the walls of which were made of reeds
plastered with mud or desert clay stamped around them and supported by
intermittent posts in grooves in the bedrock. Similarly constructed huts can
still be found in Egypt even today.
But
what was the date of these ancient huts? Although some mud-brick domestic
buildings were older than the temple at MEDINET HABU, the huts we are
talking about are, as the excavators recognized, later than the temple. They
are actually situated in the temenos (courtyard) of the temple and are built
parallel to the temple wall—leading the excavators to suggest that the
temple was still there when the huts were built and belonged to workmen
assigned to demolish the temple. When was the temple demolished? We know
that it was still standing in the time of Ramesses III (c. 1184-1153 B.C.E.).
We know this because he built his temple adjacent to the temple complex of
Ay and Horemheb; the girdle wall of the Temple of Ramesses III is slightly
deflected from its course in order to avoid the nearby complex of the Temple
of Ay and Horemheb. (That is actually how the excavators happened to find
the Temple of Ay and Horemheb: They saw the deflection of the girdle wall of
the Temple of Ramesses III and suspected it made this curve to avoid another
temple complex.)
So
the Temple of Ay and Horemheb was demolished no earlier than the time of
Ramesses III’s successor, Ramesses IV, who reigned from approximately 1153
to 1147 B.C.E. Indeed, Ramesses IV is the most likely candidate to have
begun the demolition since he erected a temple immediately adjacent to the
north and found it necessary to move some of the perimeter wall of the
Temple of Ay and Horemheb. Moreover, Ramesses IV demolished several temples
in the Theban west bank; the spoils were found in the remains of another of
his temples, in an area known as Asasif.2
From
the evidence of postholes and trenches, the excavators were able to draw a
careful plan of one entire workmen’s hut and part of another. The plan of
the huts is actually marked in the bedrock. In vain, however, do we look to
Egyptian house architecture for parallels.3
On the contrary, despite the flimsy construction of these huts, we find the
same room configuration in the so-called Israelite four-room house in
Palestine.4
A
four-room house consists of three parallel long rooms separated by two walls
or rows of columns, plus a broad room across one end. Often the rooms are
subdivided, and sometimes subsidiary rooms are added. The central long room
is thought to have been a roofless courtyard, often separated from one of
the adjoining rooms by a row of columns. The four-room house is the
predominant type of domestic building in Palestine during the entire Iron
Age (1200-586 B.C.E.). In other words, it made its initial appearance when
the Israelites began to settle perceptibly in Canaan in Iron Age I and
continued to be the most popular house-type during Iron Age II. After the
Babylonian destruction of 586 B.C.E., it entirely disappeared. The
house-type endured for more than 600 years.
In
scholarly circles today, the four-room house is often called the
“Israelite house” because it is ubiquitous in the Israelite period and
at Israelite sites, with only a few appearances elsewhere. The late Yigal
Shiloh called the four-room house “an original Israelite concept.”5
Two Israeli archaeologists recently concluded in these pages that “the
four-room house may safely be called the Israelite house.”* I am not so
sure. First, there is a very old prototype from Mesopotamia and Syria,
called the “Mittelsaal Haus” (middle-room house), which goes back to the
fourth millennium B.C.E. Second, the four-room house can also be found
outside the settlement area of the proto-Israelites. Perhaps, as has been
suggested, the exceptions can be accounted for as belonging to Israelites
living for relatively short periods in non-Israelite areas. On the other
hand, some of the earliest four-room houses, at Tel Masos in the Negev, have
been ascribed to the Amalekites,6
although the excavators claim the settlement is Israelite. At two sites
suggested to be Philistine (Tel Qasile, stratum X, and Tel Sera‘#146;=Tell
esh-Shari‘#146;a, stratum VII), four-room houses have been excavated, but
they date to the end of Iron Age I (1000 B.C.E.) at the earliest and
probably to Iron Age II. Apparently, if Philistines built four-room houses,
they did not do so until some time after their settlement on Palestine’s
southern coastal plain. Most of the four-room houses are from Israelite
settlements. Even if all early four-room houses are not necessarily
Israelite, the early or proto-Israelites were surely among their main
inhabitants.
The
four-room house at MEDINET HABU was not recognized as such by the
excavators. I recognized it by pure chance when studying the Chicago
reports. There can be no doubt now what it is, especially because of the
very typical pillar separation of the center room or courtyard from one side
room (a hallmark of the four-room house) and the fact that the four-room
house first appears in Palestine at precisely this time. In one detail,
however, the Egyptian example does deviate from the usual four-room house:
Its entry is through the broad room rather than through the courtyard (the
middle long room). (From the broad room, one would have walked into the
middle long room.) But even this anomaly sometimes occurs in houses in
Canaan, at Tel Masos, for example.7 It
may well be that the entry to this house is through the broad room because
it is the northern room and, as in most contemporary Egyptian houses, is
designed to let the prevailing north wind enter the house, especially during
the heat of the summer.8
On
this basis, the workmen—perhaps slaves—employed to demolish the Temple
of Ay and Horemheb in the late 12th century B.C.E. could have been early
Israelites, although we cannot prove it with absolute certainty.
Ramesses
III campaigned against Sea Peoples (including Philistines), as well as Shosu
Bedouin, and brought them back as prisoners of war. According to the first
section of the Papyrus Harris (one of the longest ancient Egyptian papyri
still in existence, now in the British Museum), most of these Shosu Bedouin
were dispersed among the main temples as slaves. Many scholars follow
Raphael Giveon in identifying the early Israelites as a faction of the Shosu
Bedouin.9 In any event, it is
clear that the majority of early Israelites came out of this pool of
wanderers.
The
above-mentioned Harris papyrus recounts Ramesses III’s exploits during
what was probably the last, large-scale Egyptian campaign in Canaan:
I
extended all the frontiers of Egypt and overthrew those who had attacked
them from their lands. I slew the Denyen in their islands, while the Tjeker
and the Philistines were made ashes. The Sherden and Weshesh of the Sea were
made nonexistent, captured all together and brought in captivity to Egypt
like the sands of the shore ... I destroyed the people of Seïr among the
bedouin [Shosu] tribes. I razed their tents, their people, their property,
and their cattle as well, without number, pinioned and carried away in
captivity, as the tribute of Egypt. I gave them to the Ennead of the gods,
as slaves for their houses (temples).10
The
Sea Peoples (including Philistines) who came originally from the Aegean or
Asia Minor had their own distinctive domestic architecture. (No four-room
houses have been found at such Philistine sites as Ekron, Ashdod and
Ashkelon.) They may have occasionally adopted the four-room house, but only
later. (But even this is doubtful, as excavator Amihai Mazar informs me; at
the Philistine site of Tell Qasile, the discovery of a colored rim jar may
be an indication that Israelites were present at the site and responsible
for building the four-room houses there.)
The
proto-Israelites, however, were expanding dramatically in the 12th century
B.C.E. Archaeologists have recently found several hundred new settlements
with four-room houses and related structures in the highlands of central
Canaan. Therefore some proto-Israelites were very likely among the prisoners
from the campaigns of Ramesses III and were employed to demolish the Temple
of Ay and Horemheb. The workmen who lived in the four-room house in Egypt
were probably slaves descended from the prisoners of war from Palestine or
the desert of Seïr—perhaps early or proto-Israelites.
The
next question is whether this four-room house in Egypt may be significant in
dating the presence of proto-Israelites in Egypt (perhaps corresponding to
the Biblical Exodus). I think it is. The demolition in which these probable
proto-Israelite workmen participated occurred after the time of Ramesses
III, no earlier than the reign of Ramesses IV—c.1153-1147 B.C.E., in other
words in the mid-12th century. Not in the XVIIIth Dynasty, not in the XIXth
Dynasty, but in the XXth Dynasty, the second of whose rulers was Ramesses
III.
If
proto-Israelites were in Egypt at this time, as the reed huts by the Temple
of Ay and Horemheb suggest, they must have been close to Egypt prior to this
time. It seems highly likely that to some extent they had already settled in
Canaan or in its immediate neighborhood, and later were either deported to
Egypt by force, or migrated toward Egypt in order to keep their flocks alive
(as the Bible suggests). This reasoning would imply that if an Exodus (a
flight of a group of proto-Israelite slaves)11
occurred, the order of the Biblical tradition should be reversed.
First
came the Israelite settlement of Canaan, which had already begun before
their sojourn in Egypt. Otherwise they would not have demanded to return to
this region after leaving Egypt.
Second
came their time in Egypt.
Third
came the Exodus from Egypt. It is also possible that some proto-Israelites
moved (or were moved) to Egypt directly from Transjordan, and only
afterwards departed for Canaan. Such a case could be made for the Shosu whom
Ramesses III captured in the desert of Seïr.12
But for most of the proto-Israelites the connection with Canaan must have
been established before their journey to Egypt. Therefore, the presence of
proto-Israelites in Egypt should be dated to a time when the settlement at
Canaan had already begun.
According
to recent archaeological surveys, the spread of Iron Age settlements
ascribed to the proto-Israelites began no earlier than the 12th century
B.C.E.13 These settlements were
located in the central hill country of Canaan, while the Canaanites
continued to control the fertile plains. However, the material
culture—mainly pottery—of these new settlers is so significantly
different from that of the inhabitants of Palestine in the Late Bronze Age
that we must assume a new population with a pastoral background had arrived.
Whether this migration was a peaceful infiltration or a military conquest is
a question that we need not decide here.14
Suffice it to say that in the stratigraphy of a large part of Canaan,
archaeologists have found a series of destruction levels in the 12th century
B.C.E. indicating military actions by the Sea Peoples (Philistines),15
by proto-Israelites and by related populations. These are found not only on
the coast, but also in the interior (at Megiddo, Taanach, Gibeon and Hazor).
The
famous Merneptah Stele that mentions Israel in Canaan, not as a city or a
state or a land, but as a people, can be dated to the late 13th century
B.C.E. and is therefore sometimes cited as evidence for an Exodus at some
time earlier in the 13th century. But Israel is mentioned along with
Ashkelon, Gezer and Yinoam. These names follow a progression from the coast
to the interior (Yinoam is southwest of the Sea of Galilee). The stele may
indicate that the people Israel were still east of the Jordan at this time.
At any rate, the Israelites (or proto-Israelites) clearly did not possess
any land of their own at this point, because the hieroglyphic determinative
attached to their name indicates they were still a people without a land.16
All
this, I believe, supports an assumption that the settlement in Canaan took
place no earlier than the early 12th century B.C.E.—in the XXth Dynasty.
This was followed by the sojourn in Egypt (at least by some of the
proto-Israelites). If there was a historical Exodus, it was probably a group
of these people who left Egypt in the XXth Dynasty.
This
finding also could have significant implications for the core historicity of
the Biblical account. Ancient philology indicates that the historical
reliability of oral traditions can be sustained for only about three to six
generations—say 200 years at most. After that the historical picture fades
into mythical darkness.17 This is
as true for Herodotus as it is for the Hebrew Bible. Genealogical lists are
the exceptions; they can be reliable for a much longer period.18
The
books of Genesis and Exodus may have taken their final shape only in the
seventh century B.C.E. Admittedly, the Biblical writers had sources. They
did not write on a clean slate, a tabula rasa. There may well have been
written accounts from as early as the time of the United Monarchy (the hotly
debated tenth century B.C.E.), when we even find some references to court
annals.19
If
Israel’s stay in Egypt and the so-called Exodus occurred in the XXth
dynasty, say the middle of the 12th century B.C.E. (and it may have occurred
a little later—Ramesses IV’s reign is the earliest that the Temple of Ay
and Horemheb could have been destroyed), and if the accounts of the Exodus
were written down in the mid-tenth century B.C.E., this puts us just within
the limits of historical reliability. (Another way of calculating is by the
number of generations in the Biblical account. Gary Rendsburg has counted
five generations from David back to the Exodus—back to Nachshon, Aaron’s
brother-in-law [Exodus 6:23].)
Dating
the Exodus to the XXth dynasty (mid-12th century B.C.E.) brings us
significantly closer to the composition of the Biblical writings that
incorporate the Exodus tradition.
Moreover,
a date so late would be consistent with the description of the “Way of the
Land of the Philistines” in the book of Exodus (what the Egyptians called
“the Way of Horus”). The Israelites did not, according to Exodus 13:17,
leave Egypt by the Way of the Land of the Philistines. By the XXth dynasty,
the Philistines were already settled in their pentapolis—Ashkelon, Ashdod,
Gath, Ekron and Gaza—on the southern Canaanite coast. The term “way of
the Philistines” is no longer an anachronism. It would make sense for the
Israelites to avoid this route.
From
a purely literary viewpoint, the earliest Hebrew texts—like the Song of
Deborah (Judges 5) and the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15)—that incorporate
the Exodus and Sinai traditions date from very close to this time, in the
opinion of leading scholars, including Frank M. Cross, J.C. De Moor, D.A.
Robertson and others.20 In the
article following this one, Baruch Halpern, a respected Biblical scholar,
explains how these poems are dated and places their composition between 1050
and 1100 B.C.E.—well within 200 or even 100 years of the Exodus, meaning
that they could very likely contain an accurate recital of core history.
Indeed, people who had been in Egypt and participated in the Exodus may well
have still been alive when these songs were composed.
Footnotes:
1. See U. Hölscher,
The Excavations of MEDINET HABU II, Oriental Institute Publications 41
(Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1939), pp. 68-72, esp. 71 and fig. 59. See
also Manfred Bietak, “An Iron Age Four-Room House in Ramesside Egypt,”
Eretz Israel 23 (1991), pp. 10-12, and “Der Aufenhalt ‘#145;Israels’
in Ägypten und der Zeitpunkt der ‘Landnahme’ aus heutiger archäologischer
Sicht,” Egypt and the Levant 10 (2000), pp. 179-186.
2.
Manfred Bietak, “Thebes-West (Luqsor): Vorbericht über die ersten vier
Grabungskampagnen (1969-1971),” Sitzungsberichte der
Philosophisch-historischen Klasse der Österreichischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 278, Band 4 (Vienna, 1972), pp. 17-26.
3.
H. Ricke, Der Grundriss des Amarna Wohnhauses (Leipzig, 1932); A. Badawy, A
History of Egyptian Architecture: The Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1968), pp. 11-35, 55; E. Roik, “Das altägyptische Wohnhaus und seine
Darstellung im Flachbild,” Europ. Hochschulschriften, Reihe XVIII, Band 15
(Frankfurt-Bern, 1988). The contributions in the following provide a panorama of the present
state of house research in Ancient Egypt: “House and Palace in Ancient
Egypt,” International Symposium 8th to 11th April 1992 in Cairo, ed. M.
Bietak, in Untersuchungen der Zweigstelle Kairo des Österreichischen Archäologischen
Instituts 14. Denkschriften der Gesamtakademie 14 (Vienna, 1995), pp. 23-43.
4. Recent
summary of literature: John S. Holladay, Jr., “The Four-Room House,” in
Eric M. Meyers, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East
vol. 2 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 337-342. Further reading:
Yigal Shiloh, “The Four-Room House: Its Situation and Function in the
Israelite City,” Israel Exploration Journal (IEJ) 20 (1970), pp. 180-190,
and “The Four-Room House—The Israelite Type-House?” Eretz-Israel
11 (1973), pp. 277-285 (in Hebrew); Volkmar Fritz, “Bestimmung und
Herkunft des Pfeilerhauses in Israel,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen
Palastina-Vereins (ZDPV) 93 (1977), pp. 30-45; F. Braemer, L’architecture
domestique du Levant à l’age du fer (Paris, 1982), pp. 102-105; George
Ernest Wright, Ancient Building in South Syria and Palestine (Leiden-Köln,
1985), pp. 134-136, 225-229, 294-298 and Figure 31, 194.
5. Shiloh,
“Four-Room House,” IEJ 20 (1970), p. 180.
6. Personal
information.
7. Volkmar
Fritz, ZDPV 92 (1976), pl. 2, loc. no 110b and 124 and ZDPV 96 (1980), pp.
121-135; Fritz and Kempinski, “Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen auf der Chirbet
Msas (Tel Masos), Abhandlungen des Deutschen Palästina Vereins, vols. I-III
(Wiesbaden, 1983).
8. The plan of
the second four-room house, of which only about a third is plotted, does not
appear to contain this anomaly. The entry is not through the north.
9. Raphael
Giveon, Les Bedouin Shosou des documents égyptiens (Leiden, 1971).
10. James B.
Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1969), p. 262.
11. As
illustrated in Papyrus Anastasi V.19, 3-20-6 from the time of the end of the
XIXth Dynasty (c. 1200 B.C.E.)
12. W. Erichsen,
Papyrus Harris I, Hieroglyphische Transkription. Bibliotheca Aegyptiaca V,
Brussels 1933, 93 (p. 76, 9-10).
13. Israel
Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel
Exploration Society 1988 [Hebrew, Tel Aviv, 1986]).
14. On this,
see Abraham Malamat, “Israelite Conduct of War in the Conquest of
Canaan,” in Symposia Celebrating the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the
Founding of the American Schools of Oriental Research (1900-1975), ed. Frank
M. Cross (Cambridge, MA, 1979), pp. 35-56; B.S.J. Isserlin, “The
Israelites’ Conquest of Canaan: A Comparative Review of the Arguments
Applicable,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 115 (1983), pp. 85-94;
Volkmar Fritz, “Conquest or Settlement? The Early Iron Age in
Palestine,” Biblical Archaeologist 50 (1987), pp. 94f.
15. M. Bietak,
“Zur Landnahme Palästinas durch die Seevölker und zum Ende der ägyptischen
Provinz Kanaan,” in Festschrift Werner Kaiser, MDAIK 47 (1991), pp. 35-50;
“The Sea Peoples and the End of the Egyptian Administration in Canaan,”
in A. Biran and J. Aviram, eds., Biblical Archaeology Today II, Proceedings
of the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem,
June-July, 1990 (Jerusalem, 1993), pp. 299-306; Trude Dothan, “The Arrival
of the Sea Peoples: Cultural Diversity in Early Iron Age Canaan,” in
Recent Excavations in Israel: Studies in Iron Age Archaeology, ASOR 49
(1989), pp. 1-14; T. Dothan & M. Dothan, People of the Sea: The Search
for the Philistines (New York, 1992); I. Singer, “The Beginning of
Philistine Settlement in Canaan and the North Boundary of Philistia,” Tel
Aviv 12 (1985), pp. 109-122; I. Singer, “Egyptians, Canaanites, and
Philistines in the Period of the Emergence of Israel,” in From Nomadism to
Monarchy, eds. I. Finkelstein and N. Na’aman (Jerusalem: Israel
Exploration Society, 1994), pp.
232-238;
Lawrence E. Stager, “The Impact of the Sea Peoples in Canaan (1185-1050
B.C.E.),” in T.E. Levy, ed., The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land
(New York: Facts on File, 1995), pp. 332-348.
16.
H. Engel, “Die Siegesstele des Merneptah,” Biblica 60 (1979), pp.
373-394;
M.C. Astour, “Yahweh in Egyptian Topographical Lists,” in Elmar
Edel
Festschrift (Bamberg 1979), pp. 17-34.
17. D.P. Henige,
The Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford, 1974); J. Vansina, Oral Tradition
as History (London, 1985); O. Murray, “Herodotus and Oral History,” in
H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg and A. Kuhrt, eds., Achaemenid History II: The Greek
Sources (Leiden, 1987), pp. 93-115; D.D. Fehling, Herodotus and His Sources
(Leeds, 1989); W. Burkert, “Lydia Between East and West or How to Date the
Trojan War: A Study in Herodotus,” in J.B. Carter and S.P. Morris, eds.,
The Ages of Homer, A Tribute to E.T. Vermeule (Austin, 1995), pp. 139-148.
18. D.P. Henige,
The Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 121-144.
19. On
the emergence of written culture with the state, see for example, T.N.D.
Mettinger, “Solomonic State Officials. A Study of the Civil Government
Officials in the Israelite Monarchy,” Coniectanea Biblica, OTS, vol. V (Lund, 1971); Volkmar
Fritz, “Die Entstehung Israels im 12. und 11. Jh.
V. Chr.,” Biblical Encyclopaedia vol. 2 (Stuttgart, 1996), pp. 202f.
20. Frank M.
Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA, 1980); J.C. De Moor,
“The Rise of Jahwism. The Roots of Israelite Monotheism II” Bibliotheca
ephemeridum theologicarum Lovaniensium (Louvain, 1990); D.A. Robertson,
Linguistic Evidence in Dating Early Hebrew Poetry (Missoula, MT, 1972).
_________________________________________________________________
6. Four-Room Israelite house - Ideology in Stone, by
Shlomo Bunimovitz and Avraham Faust
Biblical
Archaeology Review 28:04, Jul/Aug 2002.
http://cojs.org/cojswiki/Ideology_in_Stone,_Shlomo_Bunimovitz_and_Avraham_Faust,_BAR_28:04,_Jul/Aug_2002
During
the late 1920s, an expedition by the Pacific School of Religion discovered
three houses of strikingly similar design at Tell en-Nasbeh, Biblical Mizpah.
When the first of these was unearthed in 1927, excavators thought it was a
temple, and Professor William F. Badè, the excavation director, held a
church service in its ruins.1
Today, hundreds of these buildings have been found, and are now referred to
by a generic name, the four-room house. Sometimes they are also called the
“Israelite house,” and whether that is an acceptable designation is
among the questions we will consider.
The
four-room house has three parallel long rooms separated by two walls or rows
of columns, plus a broad room across one end. Subsidiary rooms may be added
and rooms may be subdivided, but the basic plan is always the same. Some
scholars think that one of the long rooms, usually the center one, was
unroofed, creating a kind of courtyard. Most of these buildings also seem to
have had a second story, although only sparse evidence of this has survived.
This
kind of house is found throughout the country. It is the predominant type of
domestic building in Iron Age Israel (1200–586 B.C.E.). It first appeared
in about 1200 B.C.E.—just as the Israelites were beginning to coalesce as
a people in Canaan—and reached its mature form toward the end of Iron Age
I (sometime before 1000 B.C.E.), roughly when the processes that led to the
establishment of the Israelite monarchy were beginning. It dominated the
architecture of Iron Age II (1000–586 B.C.E.) and completely disappeared
after the Babylonian destruction of 586 B.C.E., which ended the monarchy and
started the Babylonian Exile.2
Some
scholars have suggested that the four-room house evolved from the earlier
nomad’s tent,3 while others
seek its roots in Late Bronze Age Canaanite architecture, especially in the
region of the Shephelah.4 Most
often, however, the popularity of the four-room house has been explained in
terms of its close association with the Israelites as a people. The idea of
the four-room house as the Israelite house was expressed by the late Yigal
Shiloh, of Hebrew University: “In the light of the connection between the
distribution of this type and the borders of Israelite settlement, and in
the light of its period of use and architectural characteristics, it would
seem that the four-room house is an original Israelite concept.”5
But
neither Shiloh nor any other early proponent of the association between the
four-room house and the Israelites suggested a satisfactory answer to the
basic question: Why was this type of building so popular among the
Israelites? Only recently has an answer been offered—an explanation that
stresses the house’s function. In the view of Harvard’s Lawrence Stager,
“The pillared [four-room] house takes its form not from some desert
nostalgia monumentalized in stone and mudbrick, but from a living tradition.
It was first and foremost a successful adaptation to farm life: the ground
floor had space allocated for food processing, small craft production,
stabling, and storage; the second floor was suitable for dining, sleeping,
and other activities … Its longevity attests to its continuing suitability
not only to the environment … but also for the socio-economic unit housed
in it—for the most part, rural families who farmed and raised
livestock.”6 John S. Holladay
of the University of Toronto echoes Stager: “From the time of its
emergence in force until its demise at the end of Iron Age II, the economic
function of the ‘Israelite [Four-Room] House’ seems to have been
centered upon requirements for storage and stabling, functions for which it
was ideally suited … Furthermore, its durability as preferred house type,
lasting over 600 years throughout all the diverse environmental regions of
Israel and Judah, even stretching down into the wilderness settlements in
the central Negev, testifies that it was an extremely successful design for
the common—probably landowning—peasant.”7
While
this functional explanation seems compelling, however, it fails to convey
the full story of the four-room house as a cultural phenomenon.
More
than 30 years ago, Shiloh himself noticed that the four-room plan appears in
a wide variety of Iron Age II buildings—from common private dwellings to
monumental buildings such as the citadel at Hazor in the north or the Negev
forts. He reasonably concluded that “The four-room plan was thus used as a
standard plan for buildings of very different function within the Israelite
city.”8 Today we can expand
Shiloh’s conclusion to include many more examples, from isolated farms and
hamlets to main urban centers. Even though all these buildings haven’t
been fully analyzed, it is clear from their contents that they served a
great variety of functions—as residences for single soldiers,9
as dwellings for nuclear and extended families,10
as administrative buildings11 and
so on. All these diverse functions were served by the same basic
architectural plan—a plan that was used even in tombs.12
This “astonishing rigidity in concept,” as Volkmar Fritz aptly phrases
it,13 also had astonishing
durability—it lasted almost 600 years.
Is
there more to the popularity and durability of the four-room house design
than its functionality? And if the raison d’être of this structure lies
only in its functional suitability for peasant life, why did the peasants in
ancient Israel not continue to use it following the Babylonian destruction
and exile, through the Persian period and thereafter? And why did they use
it for other than domestic purposes before the Babylonian exile?
We
believe that the four-room house was a symbolic expression of the Israelite
mind—that is, their ethos or world-view. At the same time, this style of
domestic architecture in turn helped to structure that mind.
Our
approach to the four-room house issue concurs with the idea of a “new
Biblical Archaeology” promoted recently by William G. Dever. He calls for
a renewed, balanced dialogue between archaeologists of the Biblical period
and the Biblical texts that provide an indespensable “window” into the
thought-world of ancient Israel. According to Dever: “an explanation of
what really took place in ancient Israel in the Iron Age must look not only
at the material remains of that culture, but also at those ideals, spiritual
and secular … that motivated those who were the bearers of that
culture.”14 In light of current theoretical development in archaeology, it is
obvious that an explanation of “what happened in history” cannot be
reduced merely to adaptation—to materialist or determinist schemes that
only take into account factors like environment, technology and subsistence
and ignore the role of symbols, ideology and even religion in the shaping of
society and in culture change.
At
the start, we may dispel the argument made by some scholars that the
four-room house is not really an Israelite house due to the fact that
examples can be found outside Israelite territory.15
Most of the examples often cited, such as ‘Afula, Tel Qiri and Tell Keisan
in the northern valleys of Israel, are not really four-room houses; while
they may have four rooms, their configuration is completely
different—comprising broad rooms and front courts or a mixture of rooms
and courts.16
In
other cases (for example, Sahab in Transjordan) there seems to be some
confusion between four-room houses and pillared buildings.17
True four-room houses found outside Israelite territory mainly date to the
early Iron Age,18 prior to the final consolidation of ethnic groups in the
region. And some of these houses may actually have been located within a
temporarily expanded Israelite territory.19
The remaining examples outside ancient Israel are very few indeed, and may
be explained as representing ephemeral use by non-Israelites or by
Israelites living in non-Israelite regions. Both temporally and
geographically, the four-room house may safely be called the Israelite
house.
The
first scholar to suggest that the four-room house might be explained as a
symbolic expression of the uniquely Israelite mentality and worldview was
Moshe Weinfeld of Hebrew University.20
More than a decade ago, Weinfeld insightfully suggested that the house plan
might have facilitated the separation between ritual purity and
impurity—such as men’s avoidance of women during menstruation—that was
so important to the Israelite way of life. Indeed, on examining the
four-room plan one can immediately recognize its greatest merit, which is
maximum privacy: Once you entered the central space of the building (whether
an open or roofed courtyard), you could enter any room directly without
passing through adjacent rooms. Other dwelling structures in ancient Israel
during the Bronze and Iron Ages seem to lack this special quality.
In
the last couple of decades, cultural anthropologists have written about what
they call “the social logic of space.”21
The way people organize the spaces they inhabit reveals such matters as
social hierarchies and cultural codes. Building layouts can be analyzed and
compared for their “space syntax”: How, for example, does a particular
building plan affect the way a visitor or inhabitant may have access to its
different rooms? Which rooms must be passed through first? What parts of the
house are most out of reach? The social meaning of space syntax derives from
the possible contact of a building’s inhabitants with strangers as well as
each other. Different space syntaxes, therefore, hint at different systems
of social and cultural relations.
For
example, if matters of purity were crucial in the conduct of Israelite daily
life, then the unique plan of the four-room house facilitated it. Many
societies segregate or restrict the movement of women who are menstruating;
unlike the laws of other ancient Near Eastern societies, most of the
Biblical purity injunctions22 do
not require menstruating women to leave the house,23
but given other restrictions imposed on them, it is reasonable to assume
that if some of these rules were kept, Israelite women spent some of their
time separate from the house’s other inhabitants. The plan of the
four-room house seems eminently suited to such a practice: Because each room
could be entered directly from the central space without passing through
other rooms, purity could be strictly maintained even if a ritually impure
person resided in the dwelling.
Examples
like this hint at a possible connection between the four-room layout and
specific cultural behavior (like men avoiding menstruating women). The
layout may have been developed to accommodate that specific behavior—or,
perhaps, the behavior may have grown out of the house plan. That is, while
the plan may have developed for other (perhaps functional) reasons, it might
have also enabled (or even encouraged) the development of a certain
“purity behavior” and discouraged other behavior that could not be
accommodated within the house. Indeed, it could well be that the house plan
and the behavior evolved together and shaped each other.
The
four-room house also expresses the “democratic” or egalitarian ethos of
Israelite society. In this respect, the space syntax of the four-room house
is conspicuously different from that of other contemporaneous house types,
such as the houses at Tell Keisan, Tel Qiri and Tel Hadar in northern Israel
as well as Bronze Age houses. The latter have a more linear form—a visitor
must pass through each room in sequence—which expresses hierarchy and
restricts access or movement within the dwelling.24
The four-room house does the opposite: Its shallow, “tree-like” shape
allows easy and direct access to each room from the central courtyard.
A
recent study has demonstrated that large households with more families have
a more complex and hierarchically structured arrangement of living and
sleeping spaces, reflecting their complex social structure. People of lower
status—whether because of age or gender or marital status—are more
accessible in terms of the structural “depth” of space within the house
than are those of higher status. For instance, in these houses, special
living or sleeping areas are frequently set aside for married children as
opposed to unmarried children; this is in contrast to the ad hoc sleeping
arrangements or shared sleeping spaces often seen in societies with simpler,
more egalitarian dwellings. We would expect to see some degree of
hierarchical structuring of the domestic space in Israelite houses: In rural
and elite, well-to-do four-room houses, rooms are often subdivided, enabling
them to be divided hierarchically. But the potential for that is limited
because of the inherent simplicity of the layout—the house, again, lacks
depth. The four-room house plan therefore expresses the egalitarian ethos of
the Israelites.
But
was Israelite society actually egalitarian? Biblical scholars have long
emphasized its democratic and egalitarian character as portrayed by the
Biblical narratives, and many passages contain information about the
egalitarian character of the Israelite society.25
But social ideology—the way a society represents itself—often differs
from social reality. Indeed, anthropology teaches us that “equality is a
social impossibility.”26 Niels
Lemche has suggested that “instead of speaking of egalitarian societies it
would be more appropriate to speak of societies which are dominated by an
egalitarian ideology … A society whose ideology is egalitarian need not in
fact be egalitarian.”27 So although the Bible reflects an egalitarian ethos, the reality
was undoubtedly somewhat different. The “egalitarian” four-room house
plan seems to have been more consonant with the Israelites’ ideology than
other house plans, even though as a matter of social reality there were
small and large houses, poor and rich ones.
The
four-room house was really a kind of symbol—communicating the
Israelites’ value system nonverbally to both its occupants and to the
surrounding community.28 The house’s internal structure communicated to its residents
the mutually-held concepts of a common cultural system, by creating an
environment that reinforces existing social divisions based on gender,
generation and rank, which are linked to cosmological schemes—that is, the
people’s view of how the world is ordered. Just by living in the house,
occupants are constantly reminded of these values and principles, which are
thus inculcated in each new generation.
The
house also conveyed a message to the outside community about the economic
and social status of the household, sending signals about matters of social
difference like affluence and taste. At the same time, it also seems to bear
a message essential in supporting the egalitarian ideals of Israelite
society as a whole. Building a house according to the traditional code of a
society communicates the important message that “we’re part of the
community,” thereby enhancing the cohesion of that community.
But
how do we explain why the four-room house is so ubiquitous, even in
nonresidential buildings? No matter how persuasive, the functional argument
falls far short of explaining why this layout was applied not only to family
dwellings but also to public buildings.
The
anthropologist Mary Douglas has developed the idea that many of the Biblical
laws are actually about order.29
Only in wholeness and completeness may holiness reside. Many of these laws,
covering all aspects of life—from war to sexual behavior and from social
conduct to dietary rules—are based on precepts that are rooted in that
basic principle. All of these precepts embrace the idea that holiness comes
from order and sin from chaos. Holiness requires completeness in a social
context—an important enterprise, once begun, must not be left incomplete.
To be holy, individuals must conform to the category to which they belong,
and different categories of things must not be mixed together. To be holy is
to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity, purity, perfection of
the individual and of the kind. Hybrids and other mixtures are abominations.30
For example, garments of mixed wool and flax are forbidden and an ass may
not be yoked with an ox (Deuteronomy 22:10–11).
The
Israelites’ ideology of purity and order helps make sense of the
astonishing dominance of the four-room plan at almost all levels of
Israelite architectural design. To the Israelites, this conformity of design
communicated unity and order and negated separateness and chaos. These
strongly-held concepts must have percolated through all spheres of daily
life, including material culture. We can imagine that once the four-room
house took shape and was formalized as the container and embodiment of the
Israelite lifestyle and symbolic order, it became the “right” house
type—hence its great popularity. Building according to other architectural
schemes must have been considered a deviation from the norm and possibly a
violation of the holy order.
For
these reasons, the four-room house became the Israelite house. The two are
synonymous. At the dawn of the Iron Age, the embryonic versions of the
four-room house and its more humble subtypes were options among a variety of
house plans. The limited popularity of the house at this stage barely hinted
at its eventual universality. Function may have played a role in the
evolution of the layout, but one should not forget that for many generations
Canaanite peasants seem to have managed quite well with other types of
dwellings. In any event, during the later part of Iron Age I, the well-known
form of the house crystallized and became dominant, mainly in the central
hill country where archaeology and the Bible tell us that early Israelites
settled. The few examples of the four-room house outside this region did not
outlast Iron Age I.
Apparently,
in this very phase of the Israelites’ emergence as a distinct, unique
people, the Israelites’ ideology and mindset shaped (and were shaped by)
the form of their domestic architecture. At this point, the house began to
reflect Israelite cultural behavior—their egalitarian ethos, their need
for privacy, the seclusion of the ritually impure and so on—and perhaps
even became an ethnic marker—that is, a distinctive feature of the
Israelites as an ethnic group unto themselves (see “Israelites and
Canaanites: You Can Tell Them Apart,” in this issue).
Material
culture should not be equated too directly with ethnicity,31 but when ethnic groups express their identity as different from
other groups, they may deliberately use certain distinctive aspects of their
material culture to communicate that difference. This can be done in several
ways. People could adopt certain traits that identify them as belonging to
group X and not Y (in many cases a certain item of clothing is used). These
symbols, however, are arbitrary (that is, ethnic distinctions can make use
of any material item), and are, therefore, sometimes hard to identify
archaeologically.
Another
way ethnicity is reflected in the archaeological record is through
“ethnically specific behavior.”32
We have seen how, internally, the four-room house successfully expressed and
reinforced Israelite values and way of life, as demonstrated by its growing
popularity. And because of the importance of order and unity to the
Israelites’ perception of holiness, the four-room layout soon became the
dominant building plan throughout Israelite territory, and stayed that way
for more than half a millennium. Whether it was deliberately chosen at the
end of Iron Age I as an ethnic marker or only gradually, unconsciously took
on this role (that is, as a result of “ethnically specific behavior”) we
cannot say. Yet evidently, during the later part of Iron Age I and
throughout Iron Age II, the four-room plan must be considered as
predominantly Israelite, although others may have sporadically used this
type of dwelling.
The
Assyrian invasion of the late eighth century B.C.E. ended the northern
kingdom of Israel. The Babylonian invasion of the early sixth century B.C.E.
ended the southern kingdom of Judah. Thus was ended also the omnipresent
ethnic symbol that was the four-room house. It exited the historical stage,
leaving us with only hints of its symbolic meaning for ancient Israelite
society. a. On Badè’s excavation at Tell en-Nasbeh, see Jeffrey R. Zorn,
“Mizpah: Newly Discovered Stratum Reveals Judah’s Other Capital,” BAR
23:05.
1. George
Ernest Wright, “A Characteristic North Israelite House,” in Archaeology
in the Levant: Essays for Kathleen Kenyon, Roger Moorey and Peter Parr,
eds., (Warminister: Aris & Phillips, 1978), p. 149.
2. The origins
and architecture of the four-room house and its subtypes—the three- and
the five-room house—have been the subject of numerous studies, as has the
ethnicity of the inhabitants. See Yigal Shiloh, “The Four-Room House: Its
Situation and Function in the Israelite City,” Israel Exploration Journal
(IEJ) 20 (1970), pp. 180–190 and “The Four-Room House—The Israelite
Type-House?” Eretz-Israel 11 (1973), pp. 277–285 (in Hebrew); also
Wright, “A Characteristic North Israelite House,” pp. 149–154; François
Braemer, L’architecture domestique du Levant à l’åge du Fer (Paris: éditions
Recherches sur les civilizations, 1982); Lawrence E. Stager, “The
Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel,” Bulletin of the American
Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR) 260 (1985) pp. 1–35; John S.
Holladay, Jr., “House, Israelite,” in David Noel Freedman, ed., The
Anchor Bible Dictionary vol. 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 308–318;
John S. Holladay, Jr., “The Four-Room House,” in Eric M. Meyers, ed.,
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East vol. 2 (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 337–341; Ehud Netzer, “Domestic
Architecture in the Iron Age,” in Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, eds.,
The Architecture of Ancient Israel from the Prehistoric to the Persian
Period (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1992), pp. 193–201.
3.
Volkmar Fritz, “Bestimmung und Herkunft des Pfeinlerhauses in Israel,”
Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 93 (1977), pp. 30–45; Volkmar
Fritz, Tempel und Zelt (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchen, 1977); Aharon
Kempinski, “Tel Masos,” Expedition 20:4 (1978), pp. 29–37; Ze’ev
Herzog, Beer-Sheba II: The Early Iron Age Settlements (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv
Univ., 1984), pp. 75–77.
4. Amihai
Mazar, “The Israelite Settlement in Canaan in the Light of Archaeological
Excavations,” in Janet Amitai, ed., Biblical Archaeology Today:
Proceedings of the International Congress on Biblical Archaeology,
Jerusalem, April 1984 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1985), pp.
66–68; Joseph A. Callaway, “Ai (et-Tell): Problem Site for Biblical
Archaeologists,” in Leo G. Perdue, Lawrence E. Toombs and Gary L. Johnson,
eds., Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation. Essays in Memory of D. Glenn
Rose (Atlanta: John Knox, 1987), pp. 87–99; and Shmuel Givon, “The
Three-Roomed House from Tel Harassim, Israel,” Levant 31 (1999), pp.
173–77. There are two problems with this idea: The supposed Canaanite
“prototypes” lack the broad room, which is essential for the definition
of the four-room house type; more importantly, even if some Late Bronze Age
architectural ideas were adopted during the Iron Age I period it does not
say anything about the meaning of the houses during these periods. People
can, and do, adopt cultural elements from other periods and cultures but
vest them new and different meaning. See, for example, Abner Cohen, Two
Dimensional Man: An essay on the Anthropology of Power and Symbolism in
Complex Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 3; Ian Hodder, The
Present Past, (London: Batsford, 1982), pp. 204–207.
5. Shiloh,
“Four-Room House,” IEJ 20 (1970), p. 180.
6. Stager,
“Archaeology of the Family,” p. 17.
7. Holladay,
Jr., “House, Israelite,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992), p. 316.
8. Yigal
Shiloh, “Four-Room House,” IEJ 20 (1970), p. 190 (emphasis added).
9. Lily
Singer-Avitz, “Household Activities at Beersheba,” Eretz-Israel 25
(1996), pp. 166–174 (in Hebrew).
10. Stager,
“Archaeology of the Family”; Avraham Faust, “Differences in Family
Structure between Cities and Villages in Iron Age II,” Tel-Aviv 26 (1999),
pp. 233–252. See also Avraham Faust, “The Rural Community in Ancient
Israel during the Iron Age II,” BASOR 318 (2000), p. 17–39.
11. Keith
Branigan, “The Four Room Buildings of Tell en-Nasbeh,” IEJ 16 (1966),
pp. 206–209. See also Shiloh, “Four-Room House” and “The Four-Room
House-The Israelite Type House?”
12. Amihai
Mazar, “Iron Age Burial Caves North of the Damascus Gate, Jerusalem,”
IEJ 26 (1976), p. 4, n. 9; Gabriel Barkai, “Burial Caves and Burial
Practices in Judah in the Iron Age,” in Itamar Singer, ed., Graves and
Burial Practices in Israel in the Ancient Period (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben
Zvi, 1994), p. 149 (in Hebrew); and Gabriel Barkai, “Burial Caves and
Dwellings in Judah during Iron Age II: Sociological Aspects,” in Avraham
Faust and Aren Meir, eds., Material Culture, Society and Ideology: New
Directions in the Archaeology of the Land of Israel (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan
University, Department of Land of Israel Studies, 1999), pp. 96–102 (in
Hebrew with English abstract).
13. Volkmar
Fritz, The City in Ancient Israel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1995), p. 142.
14. William G.
Dever, “Biblical Archaeology: Death and Rebirth,” in Avraham Biran and
Joseph Aviram, eds., Biblical Archaeology Today, 1990. Proceedings of the
Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, June-July
1990 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), pp. 706–722.
15. Mohammad M.
Ibrahim, “Third Season of Excavation at Sahab” (Preliminary Report),
Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 20 (1975), pp. 69–82;
Gusta W. Ahlström, The History of Ancient Palestine from the Palaeolithic
Period to Alexander’s Conquest (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1993), pp. 339–340; Israel Finkelstein, “Ethnicity and the Origin of the
Iron Age I Settlers in the Highlands of Canaan: Can the Real Israel Stand
Up?” Biblical Archaeologist 59 (1996), pp. 198–212.
16. See Avraham
Faust, “Ethnic Complexity in Northern Israel during Iron Age II,” PEQ
132 (2000), pp. 2–27. This research demonstrates that the houses were most
probably built by Canaanite-Phoenician population.
17. See, for
example, Ibrahim, “Third Season of Excavations at Sahab.”
18. James R.
Kautz, “Tracking the Ancient Moabites,” Biblical Archaeologist 44
(1981), pp. 27–35; P.M. Michèle Daviau, “Domestic Architecture in Iron
Age Ammon: Building Materials, Construction Techniques and Room
Arrangement,” in Burton MacDonald and Randall W. Younker, eds., Ancient
Ammon (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 113–136.
19. Chang-Ho C.
Ji, “The Iron I in Central and Northern Transjordan: An Interim Summary of
Archaeological Data,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 127 (1995), pp.
122–140; and “A Note on the Iron Age Four-Room House in Palestine,”
Orientalia 66 (1997), pp. 387–413; Larry G. Herr, “The Settlement and
Fortification of Tell al-’Umayri in Jordan during the LB/Iron I
Transition,” in Lawrence E. Stager and Michael D. Coogan, eds., The
Archaeology of Jordan and Beyond, Essays in Honor of James A. Sauer (Winona
Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2000), pp. 167–179.
20. Ehud Netzer,
“Domestic Architecture in the Iron Age,” 1992, p. 199, n. 24.
21. Bill
Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ., 1984). See also Edward Bruce Banning and Brian F. Byrd,
“Alternative Approaches for Exploring Levantine Neolithic Architecture,”
Paléorient 15 (1989), pp. 154–160; Sally M. Foster, “Analysis of
Spatial Patterns in Buildings (Access Analysis) as an Insight into Social
Structure: Examples from the Scottish Atlantic Iron Age,” Antiquity 63
(1989), pp. 40–50; Richard E. Blanton, Houses and Households: A
Comparative Study (New York: Plenum, 1994), pp. 24–37.
22. There is
almost a consensus regarding the dating of some of the Biblical laws
(including purity laws) to the Iron Age. Many of the laws that are
attributed to the Deuteronomist (“D”) are thought to have been written
during the late part of that period. The dating of other laws, including the
majority of the purity laws, however, is debatable. Most purity laws are
attributed to the Priestly source (“P”), and while most scholars have
dated P to the Persian period (e.g., Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament—An
Introduction [Oxford: Blackwell, 1965], pp. 207–208; Alexander Rofe,
Introduction to the Composition of the Pentateuch, [Jerusalem: Academon,
1994] [Hebrew]; see also Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus, The New
International Commentary on the Old Testament [London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1979], pp. 9–11), there is a recent tendency to date it to the Exilic
period and to date some, or even most, of its content even earlier (e.g.,
David J.A. Clines, “Pentateuch,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible,
eds. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan [Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1993], p.
580). Moreover, a growing number of influential scholars date P on various
grounds to the Iron Age (e.g., Avi Hurvitz, “The Evidence of Language in
Dating the Priestly Code,” Revue Biblique 81 (1974), pp. 24–56; Moshe
Weinfeld, “Literary Creativity,” in The World History of the Jewish
People, The Age of the Monarchies: Culture and Society, ed. Avraham Malamat
(Jerusalem: Massada, 1979), pp. 28–33; Wenham, The Book of Leviticus, p.
13; Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible (New York: Summit, 1987); Jacob
Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and
Commentary, vol. 3 of the Anchor Bible Series (New York: Doubleday, 1991),
pp. 12–13; Baruch J. Schwartz, The Holiness Legislation, Studies in the
Priestly Code (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999) pp. 32–33 (in Hebrew).
23. Milgrom,
Leviticus 1–16, pp. 952–953.
24. In this
regard, see also Banning and Byrd, “Alternative Approaches for Exploring
Levantine Neolithic Architecture,” p. 156; and Frank E. Brown, “Comment
on Chapman: Some Cautionary Notes on the Application of Spatial Measures to
Prehistoric Settlements,” in Ross Samson, ed., The Social Archaeology of
Houses (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ., 1990), pp. 103. For the examples, see
Avraham Faust, “Ethnic Complexity in Northern Israel during Iron Age
II”, PEQ 132 (2000), pp. 2–27.
25. C. Umhau
Wolf, “Traces of Primitive Democracy in Ancient Israel,” Journal of Near
Eastern Studies 6 (1947), pp. 98–108; Robert Gordis, “Primitive
Democracy in Ancient Israel,” in Poets and Prophets and Sages, Essays in
Biblical Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana Univ., 1971), pp. 45–60;
Ephraim Speiser, “The Manner of Kings,” in The World History of the
Jewish People, Judges (1971), p. 284; George E. Mendenhall, “The Hebrew
Conquest of Palestine,” Biblical Archaeologist (1962), pp. 66–87; and
Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (New York: Orbis Books, 1979).
26. Morton H.
Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House, 1967),
pp. 27–28.
27.
Niels Peter Lemche, Early Israel (Leiden: Brill, 1985), p. 223.
28. Richard
Blanton, a leading scholar who has developed this concept of nonverbal
communication, divides this phenomenon into two types—canonical and
indexical nonverbal communication; see his Houses and Households, pp. 8ff.
29. Mary
Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and
Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
30. Douglas
subsequently changed her opinion, suggesting other considerations in the
classification of pure and impure creatures (e.g., “The Forbidden Animals
in Leviticus,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 59 [1993], p.
17). This is part of a broader transformation in her views (Richard Fardon,
Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography [London: Routledge, 1999], pp.
185–205). It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss in detail
Douglas’s ideas, but her initial interpretation seems to be more in line
with the reality of ancient Israelite society (see also Milgrom, Leviticus
1–16, p. 728). In any event, it should be noted that she still stresses
the importance of “order.”
31. See Fredrik
Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.
1969); Kathryn Kamp and Norman Yoffee, “Ethnicity in Western Asia during
the Early Second Millennium B.C.: Archaeological Assemblages and
Ethnoarchaeological Prospectives,” BASOR 237 (1980), pp. 85–104; Ian
Hodder, Symbols in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1982a); Randall H.
McGuire, “The Study of Ethnicity in Historical Archaeology,” Journal of
Anthropological Archaeology 1 (1982), p. 160; Geoff Emberling, “Ethnicity
in Complex Societies: Archaeological Perspectives,” Journal of
Archaeological Research 5 (1997), p. 299 ; and Siân Jones, The Archaeology
of Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 113.
32. Randall H.
McGuire, “The Study of Ethnicity in Historical Archaeology,” Journal of
Anthropological Archaeology 1 (1982), p. 160.
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