Ruins of a city more than a dozen times larger than Jericho in the early Bronze Age (ca. 3000 BCE) have been found in Israel. It had trade networks that reached at least as far South as Egypt and also to the North. It was build on the ruins of a Neolithic settlement two thousand years older than that.
4 comments:
does it match any old testament cities?
I looked for that in the short press release article and didn't see one. I saw another story matching some ruins in Israel to a Hebrew Bible city, possibly Sodom and/or Gomorrah (I don't recall if I blogged it or just bookmarked the story) and haven't had the time to confirm that it is a different dig, but I would think that any press release would have mentioned that claim is it was the same one. My "to do" list includes confirming that point.
Given that the Hebrew Bible only starts to correspond to historically attested cities and peoples and events in the Levant starting in Iron Age (ca. 900 BCE), it wouldn't be shocking if a city that a big deal in 3000 BCE wasn't mentioned if it collapsed before then (and many urban centers in the Middle East did collapse ca. 2000 BCE), and the Hebrew Bible itself would asset that the Hebrews were in Egypt or the Northern Levant at the time, either of which could easily have overlooked this particular city if it died ca. 2000 BCE. (The story doesn't say that, but I know that from independent archaeological evidence and ancient historical writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt.) Indeed, even if the city had died not in 2000 BCE, but in 1200 BCE, i.e. Bronze Age collapse, there would be perfectly good reasons, internal to the Hebrew Bible story, for it not to mention the city for the same reasons.
Also, prior to the portion of the Torah in which the Hebrew finally end their 40 years in the Wilderness and enter the Levant (basically after Genesis and Exodus), the historical reliability of the Torah becomes much more doubtful. For example, the story of Moses as a baby and the Garden of Eden, are both attested in writing much earlier than the Hebrew Bible's internal storyline in the Levant starts (which is roughly when Moses, to whom those books of the Torah are attributed as author by tradition would have written them down if that tradition were accurate) in Mesopotamia in Sumerian texts. There are isolated attested events in Egypt that could provide a factual nugget from which the legendary histories of Genesis and Exodus were derived - the Hyskos Dynasty, the brief appearance and demise of henotheistic or monotheistic religious beliefs in Egypt, the Santorini explosion as a possible source of the plagues culminating in the Passover story, etc. But, piecing the nuggets together into a coherent narrative matching the first two books of the Torah is much more problematic.
The Sodom and Gomoorah association was at Tell el-Hammam. https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/12/28/sodom-and-gomorrah/?fbclid=IwAR1CXHMG2XPBibTn-y-X4s7hvEg4VKD5fTTGflUKNDL8KlRMd5Q6mcMWsPw "He posits that a meteor exploded in the air above the Middle East and created a circle-shaped plain on the northeastern edge of the Dead Sea, an area called Middle Ghor, in today’s Jordan.
According to Silvia, the area of Middle Ghor had been settled for about 2,500 years before the Bronze Age (2000-500 BC). Excavations carried out in the area at five different sites illustrate this. Another further 120 sites have been surveyed in the area. He and others of his team believe that the Middle Ghor region was the home of the ancient city (or city-state) of Sodom. . . . Tall el-Hammam covers one hundred acres. Jericho covered ten. Ancient Jerusalem ten as well. The Bible says that Sodom had a large defensive wall, and Tall el-Hammam has one made up of an estimated 60-90 million bricks: eight meters thick at the top, forty at the bottom.
Geological descriptions and words found in the Bible match Tall el-Hammam. The location was abandoned for about 700 years, in the middle of one of the centers of world civilization at the time, and a fertile one, at that."
This site is indeed different: "Halfway between the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa, the 160-acre site at En Esur was revealed during roadworks on a new interchange to the town of Harish." This is nowhere near Jordan or the Dead Sea, relatively speaking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harish,_Israel v. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_el-Hammam
A more credible source for the original story: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2018/12/04/new-science-suggests-biblical-city-of-sodom-was-smote-by-an-exploding-meteor/#46031e545c67
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