They show that the Israelites of Solomon’s time invested heavily in military deterrence. The gatehouse and walls evidently were for defense. That is, they not only smelted copper ore, but also further refined it and manufactured ingots. The three archaeologists also discovered artifacts demonstrating that the metalworkers engaged in secondary metallurgy. This piling indicates that the dung was used as a fuel for the initial heating of the smelting furnaces. Analysis of the animal bones and seeds shows that the metalworkers ate a rich diet that would have enabled them to engage in highly productive labor.īen-Yosef, Langgut, and Sapir-Hen also noted that donkey dung was piled against the inner face of walled structures. This care would have been critically important for the donkeys to be effective draft animals for the hauling of copper from the camp to central and northern Israel and for the transport of supplies to the camp. The grape pomace and hay diet shows that the donkeys were well cared for. Analysis of the dung revealed that the donkeys were fed grape pomace and hay rather than straw. Ben-Yosef, Langgut, and Sapir-Hen were able to recover animal bones and seeds and pollen in donkey dung piles. The mines and smelting camps in the Timna Valley indeed are the fabled King Solomon’s mines.īecause of the extreme aridity of the camp region, organic materials were extraordinarily preserved. The new dating measurements remove that skepticism. While there is abundant historical evidence that the rich copper ore in the region had been mined since the fifth century BC, historians expressed considerable skepticism about whether the mines and smelters were active during the reign of Israel’s King Solomon. This dating resolved a major historical controversy. The dating of several recovered artifacts established that the camp supported a community of copper metalworkers in the tenth century BC. The excavated gatehouse and livestock pens were part of one of the largest copper smelting camps in the Timna Valley. It is in one of the most arid and desolate parts of the Negev Desert.įigure: Location of Timna in Southern Israel The red dot in the figure below marks the location of Timna, approximately 19 miles north of the northernmost point of the Gulf of Aqaba. 1 They excavated a gatehouse and livestock pens in Timna, Israel. In the February 2017 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports three archaeologists, Erez Ben-Yosef, Dafna Langgut, and Lidar Sapir-Hen, announced their findings from excavations they performed in one of the most inhospitable regions in southern Israel. Archaeological digs in Israel over the past hundred years, however, have been silencing these critics, artifact discovery by artifact discovery, making an ever stronger case for the complete reliability and inerrancy of the Bible’s historical narratives and geographical descriptions.
For over two centuries liberal skeptics of an inerrant Bible have challenged the Bible’s historical accounts.
0 kommentar(er)
