Kingdom of Judah

The town of Kiriath-jearim, identified at Deir el-ꜤAzar above the village of Abu Ghosh, has come to scholarly attention recently due to the renewed
excavations led by I. Finkelstein and T. Römer. Based on their preliminary finds and on their reading of the biblical texts, they have interpreted the Iron Age IIB–C fortified compound that they have begun to expose on the summit of the site as a northern Israelite fortified compound, ‘aimed at dominating the vassal kingdom of Judah’. This paper reexamines the position of Kiriath-jearim on the border between Judah and Benjamin according to both the biblical texts and the site’s geographical location, within the context of the ongoing discussions on the biblical tribal territories, that of Benjamin in particular, the ‘ark narrative’ and other texts that mention Kiriath-jearim, and challenges the excavators’ interpretation of the character and purpose of the site during the Iron Age II.

The Regnal Chronology of the Kings of Judah and Israel: An Illustrated Guide is directed at students and academics of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament who have a specific interest in the chronology of the biblical Kings of Judah and Israel. The chronology is not my personal system, but that of Edwin R. Thiele who developed his chronology in the 1940s and 1950s and published widely on the subject. The most current edition of his work is known as “The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings,” which was published in various editions up until 1983. I have arranged the chart into a series of eight 50-year panes that are accompanied with a breakout chart of all of the available regnal details of each king. Wherever possible, I have included extra-biblical information to supplement and illustrate the chronology. This also includes a brief summary of each of the major intersections with the major imperial powers of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon.

The book presents a plethora of perspectives on the phenomenon of kingship and state in the Bible and in history. Considered here are most important parts of Old Testament literature, i.e. Pentateuch, Deuteronomistic history, Prophecy and Wisdom. Accordingly, the time span dealt with is quite broad, ranging from the pre-Monarchic era up until Hellenism. In addition some conributions reaching in their scope far beyond the boundary of the Old Testament are present, engaging thoroughly the archaeology of the “Holy Land” as well as the Ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic context of the Old Testament. The Septuagint and the New Testament, repeatedly consulted in this volume turn the attention to the questions of the history of reception. The volume is based on an international symposium held in April 2014 in Prague

A new West Semitic inscription from Khirbet Qeiyafa is presented. It was incised in Canaanite alphabetic script on a pottery storage jar before firing. Radiometric dating of the relevant layer has yielded a date of ca. 1020–980 b.c.e. The last few years have seen the publication of several new Semitic alphabetic inscriptions dated to the late 11th–10th centuries b.c.e. and originating at controlled excavations in Israel (Khirbet Qeiyafa, Beth Shemesh, Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi, and Jerusalem). The new inscription is an important addition to this corpus.

Excavations conducted on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority at Tel Lachish exposed the southern half of the six-chambered gate in Level III. In the eastern chamber, a gate shrine was uncovered. The shrine was split in two: a larger northern room and a smaller southern room. The southern room, which served as the holy of holies, had a niche in its southern wall in front of which a double altar was placed. Dozens of bowls and oil lamps were revealed inside the shrine. At some point, evidently prior to the destruction of Level III by Sennacherib in 701 b.c.e., the shrine was desecrated and sealed. This act was evident in the breakage of the altar’s horns and the placement of a latrine in the holy of holies. The available data suggests that the desecration of the shrine should be associated with Hezekiah’s cultic reform (2 Kgs 18:4).

The narratives of the Old Testament are rich with characters full and complex. This is one of the geniuses of the authors of Scripture, that though they relate historical events, places and people, they still take time to colour in the rich complexity of the characters involved. Indeed, only in Scripture will you meet people as vastly deep and complex as Abraham, Moses, Samson, Esther, David, Solomon, Ahab, Manasseh, Herod, Pilate, Peter, Paul, and a host of others. And yet the depth and complexity of the characters of Scripture are never shared simply for the sake of literary excellence. These are historical people being described to us. Human as we are. And the literarily shaped narratives in which they are found are given to us by God for our salvation and edification.

This paper will cover the portrayal of just such a character – Josiah, king of Judah from 640-609BC. It will be asked, what is the author trying to convey through his portrayal of Josiah in the narrative of 2 Chronicles 34-35.

The thesis concentrates on computational methods pertaining to ancient ostraca - ink on clay inscriptions, written in Hebrew. These texts originate from the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and dated to the late First Temple period (8th – early 6th centuries BCE). The ostraca are almost the sole remaining epigraphic evidence from the First Temple period and are therefore important for archaeological, historical, linguistic, and religious studies of this era. This “noisy” material offers a fertile ground for the development of various “robust” image analysis, image processing, computer vision and machine learning methods, dealing with the challenging domain of ancient documents’ analysis. The common procedures of modern epigraphers involve manual and labor-intensive steps, facing the risk of unintentionally mixing documentation with interpretation. Therefore, the main goal of this study is establishing a computerized paleographic framework for handling First Temple period epigraphic material. The major research questions, addressed in this thesis are: quality evaluation of manual facsimiles; quality evaluation of ostraca images; automatic binarization of the documents and its subsequent refinement; quality evaluation of binarizations on global and local levels; identification of different writers between inscriptions (two distinct methods are proposed); image segmentation (with improvements over the classical Chan-Vese algorithm); and letters’ shape prior estimation. The developed methods were tested on real-world archaeological and modern data and their results are found to be favorable.

ABSTRACT: This documentary response sheet contains a series of sequential questions, plus a separate pdf with the answers (i.e., summarized data), drawn from the video,  (shown in-class; also available online via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ih9JqwkEqg [105+ minutes]).  These sequential questions aim to maximize both student attention to various pertinent points made throughout the documentary and greater retention of the materials covered by the documentary.  In addition, the documentary has been vetted for overall content accuracy (albeit updated and/or corrected in-class), and selected to provide supplementary visual aids (e.g., images of regions, sites, finds, and other materials), additional specialist views (e.g., interviews), and other data to aid in student comprehension of the course lectures and readings from the textbooks. UPDATED: Summary sheet pdf alongside question sheet pdf.

Criticism of studies that "deconstruct" the biblical capacity measures. Bath, hin, etc., were fixed measures already in the Iron Age, not "just names of jars".  The name of a measure and the name of a jar holding it are the same. Biblical sources mention "just hin" or "just bath" - while a jar or a jug cannot be "just". We also find 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4 hin in the Bible -how can they be "only a pottery vessel"? Do jars or jugs break into accurate halves and quarters? If broken, can they hold oil or wine?

For a copy of this article, please contact me only VIA EMAIL.
Full citation:
16. Sergi, O. 2020. Saul, David and the Formation of the Israelite Monarchy: Revisiting the Historical and Literary Context of 1 Samuel 9–2 Samuel 5. In: Krause, J., Sergi, O. and Weingart, K. eds. Saul, Benjamin and the Emergence of Monarchy in Israel (Ancient Israel and its Literature 40). Atlanta (SBL Press): 57–91.

During the civil war in the United States 620,000 people died, because a kingdom had been divided. The nation divided politically, over the issue of slavery, and the northern states fought a long bloody war to end slavery forever in the USA. In the end they were victorious, but the cost was more than half a million lives. Americans can be pretty stubborn right? Even today we see our nation just as divided, if not more divided ideologically than even during the civil war. Jesus said a house divided against itself cannot stand. And we'll see today, that the splitting of the kingdom of Israel, between Judah and the northern kingdom would be a crippling blow to the nation.

The kingdom of Judah and the Philistine cities along the coast had experienced un-paralleled economic prosperity during the seventh century BCE. This is evident from the surge of settlement in the fringe areas of the Negev and the Judean desert, and  from the large production and trade centres unearthed around Jerusalem and at Ekron and Ashkelon. The discovery of Judahite wheat in Ashkelon, together with other available archaeological evidence of trade and the local geographical conditions, enable us to reconstruct the well-integrated economy of the region in the seventh century, and to re-examine its role within the period's larger economic structures. After presenting the evidence regarding the economic system of Judah and Philistia in the seventh century BCE, the paper will reconstruct the function of this "local" system within the larger "world" system, and will re-examine the role of the Assyrians, Phoenicians and Egyptians in its creation.

The fate of Esau-Edom, the twin Brother of Jacob, is somewhat blurred in Scripture. During the Hellenistic period, it became Idumea, at the southern border of Judea. But previously it seems to have been expelled eastward, far away from Canaan and the kingdom of Juda. However, by taking advantage of a special version of the book of Joshua and the allotment of the land given to Juda, it is possible to show, by a circuitous method involving the Yehud province of Nehemiah, that Edom was always close, that is, Idumea. Behind the technicalities , there was the threat of an Edomite Yahwism of local origin.

The King David of Chronicles is quite different from the one of Samuel-Kings. The Thanksgiving Song in 1 Chronicles 16 helps us see the heart of David as a man who truly loved and worshiped YHWH with all his being. This passage helps us understand how, even the not-so-perfect David in Samuel-Kings, can still be a man after God's own heart.

The discovery of numerous fragments of the Book of Jubilees among the Qumran corpus sparked renewed interest in the peculiar 364-day calendar advocated by the Jewish author of the work (ca. 200-150 BCE). This study demonstrates that embedded within the text are a set of precisely dated events which to the modern reader seem almost nonsensical, but they are put there to preserve the method by which the septenary calendar was intercalated. The calendar is therefore a practical one that was actually put into use. The study also contends that the calendar was the civil calendar of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. The PDF file is chapter one of work.

The Shephelah was densely settled in the Late Bronze Age, but most of the settlements were gradually abandoned during the transition to the Iron I period. Only a few Iron I settlements existed in the eastern part of the region (excluding the Philistine sites at the northwestern edge of the Shephelah), forming a small Canaanite enclave. During the Iron II period the region was gradually resettled, and it became part of Judah. This process lasted until the 8th century BCE, when the region reached an unparalleled demographic peak. Sennacherib’s campaign brought wide-scale destruction, and the region recovered only partially before being devastated by Nebuchadnezzar. After reconstructing the region’s settlement history, the article reassesses its political and demographic
history in comparison to the neighbouring regions of the Judean highlands and the southern coastal plain, it is concluded that the Shephelah had a lesser role in the history of Judah than some recent studies suggest.

Tell it Not in Gath’ (Micah 1:10): What is Gath Doing in a List of the Destroyed Towns of Judah?”, in Itzhaq Shai, Jeffrey R. Chadwick, Louise Hitchcock, Amit Dagan, Chris McKinny and Joe Uziel (eds.), Tell it in Gath: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Israel: Essays in Honor of Aren M. Maeir on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday, Ägypten und Altes Testament 90, Münster: Zaphon, 2018, 445-495.

This is an updated edition of a work that examines Ethiopian traditions about the Ark of the Covenant. It argues that Moses was Nubian, the Exodus passed through Ethiopia and Eritrea across a temporary volcanic land bridge to Yemen and that Ancient Israel and Judah were located in West Arabia until 722 and 586 BCE. The text of the fate of the Ark appears to have been written before Ezra the priest scribe  produced the authorized version of the Old Testament,  claiming, probably falsely,  that its historical events had mostly occurred in what is now modern Israel, Palestine and the Egyptian Delta. The geography of the Ark's movements fit an Arabian location for Judah and makes no sense when applied to a Judah in Palestine.

Final report on the Khirbet Qeiyafa, Israel excavations 2007-2013 focusing on aspects of art, cult, and epigraphy. Project sponsored by the Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Institute of Archaeology, Southern Adventist University.

The renewed excavations at Tel Moza brought to light remains of an exceptional temple complex, established in the Iron IIA (10th–9th centuries BCE). 2 An assemblage comprised of figurines and cultic vessels was found lying on the packed earth floor of the temple courtyard. The plan of the temple and the motifs of the figurines and cultic vessels are drawn from conventions prevalent throughout the Ancient Near East. The importance and unique nature of the Tel Moza temple are accentuated by the fact that it is the first Iron Age temple to be excavated in the heart of Judah, just a few km from Jerusalem, and thus provides new insight into early Israelite religion.

This work deals with the Shephelah region during the last century of the Judean Kingdom. The Judean Kingdom suffered a harsh blow by the Assyrian campaign in 701 BCE from which the settlement system in the Shephelah struggled to recover. The generally accepted view is that the resettlement of the Judean Shephelah was but a weak insignificant episode that occurred during the last days of the Judean Kingdom and began only after the end of Assyrian influence ~630 BCE. This work reexamines this view in light of new archaeological evidence chiefly from excavations of The Fourth Expedition to Lachish. Throughout the Iron Age Lachish was the largest city in the region, second only to Jerusalem, it is therefore a key site for understanding the general settlement pattern of the district.
Historical and biblical sources as well as previous archaeological excavations and regional surveys are examined in light of results from new excavations and site surveys achieving an updated and balanced view of the resettlement of the Judean Shephelah. The comprehensive analysis of new findings from the Fourth Expedition to Lachish together with the findings of all former expeditions paints a picture of Lachish in the 7th c. BCE as a fully fortified city, largely populated, well managed and with a social hierarchy, that functioned as the administrative center of the region and existed for a substantial time span. This new understanding of Lachish influences our understanding of the entire region following the Assyrian destruction. The Judean Shephelah may not have been as strong and prosperous as in the 8th c. BCE but it can no longer be viewed as a ruined and desolate region.

In the 1970’s Yigal Shiloh outlined the elements of urban planning in Israelite cities. Several type sites were identified as typical of fortified Judean cities based on these elements including Beit Mirsim, Tel en-Nasbeh, Beth Shemesh, and Beer-sheba. In 2008, Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority began excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, which I joined as an area supervisor in Area C during the 2009-2010 seasons. These excavations found that Khirbet Qeiyafa was built following the same urban plan as that of other Iron Age Judean cities. A gradualistic sequence is here observed in the evolution of a distinctly Judean urban plan as an expression of public policy related to urban planning in the Kingdom of Judah. Khirbet Qeiyafa, which is dated to the early Iron IIA period, is chronologically placed at the beginning of this sequence.

This paper spatially and temporally synthesizes data on Iron Age metallurgy in the
Levant to reveal patterns in development of ironworking in the Levant within its regional,
cultural and chronological framework. The synthesized data was used to produce a series of
maps that visually represent the changes in metallurgy over a 620 year period. The paper focuses
on the dissemination of ironworking technology as well as regional differences in its usage.