Has Archaeology Buried the Bible? by William G. Dever

Author:William G. Dever
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

The Tel Dan Inscription

David’s focus on Jerusalem as his new capital is understandable. An old Jebusite enclave, it is situated on three high hills, fairly defensible and in “neutral” territory in central Judah, and relatively well watered by springs. Furthermore, Jerusalem may not have been heavily occupied in the thirteenth to eleventh centuries BCE, as we know. The way David and his men were able to sneak into the walled city through a water conduit has been discussed above. It is tempting to connect the biblical reference to one of several water systems in Jerusalem that have been investigated since the nineteenth century. The most likely candidate for David’s tsinnor is the so-called “Warren’s Shaft” (named after its nineteenth-century explorer, Sir Charles Warren). This is a steep, narrow, vertical shaft cut through the bedrock, leading from the Gihon Spring in the valley horizontally under the city wall and then vertically up into the city. Recent examination by spelunkers, expert rock-cave climbers, shows that while the shaft was meant to be invulnerable, it was not. Difficult, but not impossible. Thus the story of David’s miraculous capture of the city of Jerusalem is by no means fantastic.

The old Jebusite city would have had a city wall, no doubt having been repaired after an earlier Canaanite destruction by now. Such a later city wall around the slopes of the City of David is in fact known. David’s palace was probably a fortified complex, a citadel like those well known in contemporary sites in Syria and Turkey (above). South of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem a monumental, multi-room stone structure with walls as much as fifteen feet thick, founded on bedrock, has been discovered. Called the “large stone structure,” it is badly ruined and only partially preserved. Some potsherds below the thin surfaces definitely do date to the tenth century BCE, but nothing remains on the floor. The excavator regards this structure as the “citadel of David,” built with Phoenician help (2 Sam. 5:11). Other scholars are less certain, and some are altogether skeptical.

David is said to have built the millo. The Hebrew term millo comes from a verb meaning “to fill.” It is presumed to refer to a sort of artificial fill, such as built-up stone terraces. A large stone-terraced slope south of the Temple Mount, known since the last century and excavated several times, is very likely to be what the biblical writers mean by their millo. It may have been first constructed in the thirteenth century BCE, but it was rebuilt several times later. It would have been essential to the buildup of a densely occupied city on the Ophel slopes, by consolidating the hillside and allowing for step-like houses to be closely grouped. The upper houses would have used the roof of the next lower ones as a terrace, and so on. Several Iron Age houses have been excavated atop this so-called “stepped stone structure.” They were destroyed in the Babylonian destruction in 586 BCE, but they may have been constructed centuries earlier as is often the case.

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