From Trash to Historical Treasure

In Gibeon, Where the Sun Stood Still, James B. Pritchard, director of the Penn Museum’s 1956–1962 excavations at this site (modern el-Jib, Palestinian Territories), gave clear expression to what he found to be the ultimate significance of his discoveries there: “The results of the excavations at el-Jib are unique in that they can be related with a high degree of certainty to specific events described in the Old Testament.…The tangible results of the archaeologist can both measure the trustworthiness of tradition and supplement it with additional information, which for one reason or another has been rejected or neglected in the written tradition.” (1962, ix).

The biblical archaeology of Pritchard’s day was motivated—in reaction to biblical skeptics—by a desire to empirically test the historicity of the events described by the Hebrew Bible. In 45 references in these texts, the town of Gibeon, only 5 miles from Jerusalem, appears as the setting of dramatic events in the biblical stories surrounding the rise of the kingdom of Israel. Pritchard considered that a material foundation for the basic veracity of these stories was supplied by his discoveries at el-Jib: a fortified town of the right period, inscriptions mentioning Gibeon, and even a large water shaft that he equated with the “pool of Gibeon,” where the rival factions of David and Saul’s son were said to have clashed (2 Samuel 2:12–17.)

Today, however, most scholars consider archaeology a better tool for identifying long-term patterns in social and economic life and cultural history than for detecting short-term events. They also acknowledge how subjective readings of ancient texts can influence archaeological interpretation. In the decades since the excavations at Gibeon, archaeologists and historians have found more of interest in the broken objects discarded in the debris filling in that great cylindrical shaft–part of that “additional information” mentioned by Pritchard. Among this “trash,” stamped and inscribed jar handles and figurine fragments of the 8th to 6th centuries BCE play an important role in reconstructions and debates about a pivotal period in the history of ancient Judah when it fell under the domination of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. Here, a closer look at the many stamp impressions attesting one aspect of Judah’s administrative system in this period will demonstrate how such fragments can be assembled to tell part of a larger story.

Judah Among the Empires

In the early 1st millennium BCE, Israel and Judah were among the many small Eastern Mediterranean kingdoms that developed in the power vacuum resulting from the fall or decline of previously dominant great empires. However, it was not long before Assyria, in northern Mesopotamia to the east, recovered strength and began to assert its power over neighboring kingdoms. By the late 700s BCE, the Assyrians were knocking on the door of Israel and Judah, and when Israel resisted, the kingdom was conquered and annexed, with many of its people deported to other lands. After its own nearly disastrous attempt at resistance, Judah fared better in the 600s BCE through compliance with Assyrian demands for tribute and loyalty. The Babylonians of southern Mesopotamia then conquered Assyria in 612 BCE and sought to take over its former subject territories in the Eastern Mediterranean. Finding Judah again resistant, in 586 BCE they sacked Jerusalem, burned its temple, and deported much of the population to Babylonia. When Cyrus the Great of Persia (modern Iran) then conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he sought to win over former Babylonian subjects by reversing earlier policies. This included allowing many exiles, among them the Judeans, to return to their homeland and rebuild. Judah became a largely self-governing province called Yehud.

The demands and depredations of imperial domination, together with the expansion of trade and cultural connections that these empires helped bring about, had a profound effect on Judah, not only politically, but also on its economy, society, and religion. More than ever before it was connected to the wide world beyond its borders; in reaction Judeans developed a distinctive identity and historical consciousness.

The “Pool” and Its Filling

The most impressive sight at Gibeon today is the great cylindrical cut down into the bedrock, 37 feet in diameter and 35 feet deep. A staircase cut into the living rock spirals down the sides and then continues in a tunnel below the pool’s floor a further 45 feet down to a chamber into which natural spring water flows. Since there is no water in the cylindrical shaft, “pool” is a bit of a misnomer. Pritchard speculated that the original plan to continue the open cylindrical shaft further was abandoned due to a change in leadership or local circumstances and the project finished in a less ambitious form. This water system allowed the inhabitants of ancient Gibeon to access their spring from behind the safety of the town’s fortification walls, even while they were under siege. It was dug sometime in the early Iron Age (1200–950 BCE) but later supplanted by a straighter stepped tunnel that ran under the city wall and down the hill to the spring.

When the circular water shaft went out of use sometime in the 600s to 500s BCE, it was filled in with earth and stones. The long and laborious process of emptying it again came 2,500 years later, when 40 men of el-Jib village passed baskets up the spiral stairs in two shifts from sunrise to sunset during the summer of 1957. In the process, the excavators recovered many broken fragments from the life and livelihood of the ancient town over the preceding centuries that had been discarded or shoveled in with the filling debris. Among all kinds of pottery vessels, clothing pins, cosmetic applicators, and tools, 56 pottery jar handles with scratched Hebrew inscriptions, 87 royal and official stamp impressions, also on jar handles, and 124 fragments of ceramic figurines depicting female figures and animals stood out as particularly significant, and Pritchard quickly documented and published these. When put into the larger context of Judean society in this period, each type of find has an interesting story to tell. The royal and official stamp impressions show us how Gibeon fit into a newly centralized administration that was adapting to meet the demands and opportunities of the day.

The Stamped Handles

Dating between the 8th and the 2nd century BCE, thousands of storage jar handles—impressed before firing with official stamps—attest a unique Judean administrative practice. The system was innovated under local rule but persisted through the land’s domination by successive empires. Mapping the location of stamps from different periods lets us follow ups and downs in the official reach of the kingdom—later, province—of Judah. Dozens of the earlier types of these impressions were found discarded in the “pool” of Gibeon, suggesting that the town hosted a significant administrative presence in the 8th to 6th centuries BCE.

The earliest impressions date to the late 700s and early 600s when Judah’s kings were under pressure from the Assyrian Empire. They proclaim royal authority with their Old Hebrew inscription lmlk (pronounced “lemelech”), meaning “belonging to the king,” and royal symbol of a four-winged scarab beetle or a two-winged sun-disc. Both of these symbols originated in Egypt as solar symbols of rebirth associated with the sun-god and the king, and the winged disc also became a royal symbol in the Near East. Their use by the king of Judah draws on these international royal and divine connotations. Below the symbol appears one of four place-names—Hebron, Socoh, Ziph, or mmšt (pronunciation and identity unknown)—apparently associated with either the production of the jars or the products stored in them.

Concentric circles incised with a metal compass and, in the late 600s, a rosette stamp succeeded the lmlk stamps as royal symbols in this administrative system, although the inscriptions disappeared. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its king and many of its people by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, it was once believed that the land was practically deserted and its traditions in ruins. However, recent research has shown that certain settlements, such as Gibeon, survived and so did the system of marking jars. Two stamps showing a lion found in the “pool” seem to date to this period of Babylonian provincial rule. The rampant lion, a motif from Neo-Assyrian art where the lion is typically shown being stabbed by the king, was adapted in Judah to stand alone as a symbol of political or divine authority. Other evidence, such as a Persian-style gold ring, suggests that Gibeon continued to be settled under Persian rule. However, as none of the typical Persian-period stamp impressions that simply bear the name of the province in Aramaic, “Yehud” (yhwd), was found there, the town may have been abandoned by the end of the 500s BCE, not long after Persian rule began.

What was this durable, long-lived official system of marking jars for, and why was Judah the only land to use it? Since neither the contents of the jars, nor many administrative documents from this period survive, scholars have interpreted the indirect clues of the jars themselves and their distribution across Judah in different ways. The jars are of a four-handled, narrow-necked type suitable for the storage and transport of wine and olive oil, two liquids produced abundantly in the limestone hills and valleys of Judah. The three known locations mentioned on the lmlk stamps were villages in this period, while most of the stamped handles were found at larger centers distributed throughout the kingdom, but not beyond its borders.

Two rival theories about the operation of this system seem to fit this evidence:

1. that the jars were sent for filling with wine and oil at large royally owned agricultural estates; or
2. private vineyard or orchard owners filled the royal jars with a portion of their own produce as taxation.

In both scenarios, the jars were then disbursed for consumption of their contents by administrators, royal family members, and military officers across the kingdom, presumably including people at Gibeon. Additional stamps bearing Hebrew personal names found at Gibeon and other sites—apparently part of the lmlk jar system—may give us the identities of some of the officials involved in the collection of goods, such as Naḥum, (son of) Hiṣṣilyahu and Meshullam, (son of) Elnathan. Whichever explanation is correct, this system of supplying the local administration could have been taken over from the royal house by the administrators of the imperial province of Judah, with a corresponding change in the symbol of the stamp.

The Judean stamping system is an ingenious solution to the problem of how ancient states could administer and account for goods in a largely pre-monetary and low-literacy agrarian society. It may have been spurred by the region’s specialization in grape and olive cultivation in this period. Many other types of evidence also point to the systematization and centralization of the political economy of Judah in the 700s and 600s BCE under Assyrian overlordship. Debate lingers about how direct a role the Assyrian Empire played in catalyzing this system. Was Judah forced to raise silver to pay imperial tribute by selling its valuable agricultural products, as some argue? Or did the pressure imposed by the empire, together with new opportunities from its creation of a vast unified trade region, stimulate economic growth?

Piecing Together a Bigger Picture

Like the stamped handles, the incised inscriptions on the handles of smaller decanter-type jars also found in the Gibeon “pool” seem to relate to wine production, in this case by private producers. In addition to growing literacy, these speak to growing specialization and commercial marketing of products in an integrated Eastern Mediterranean economy. Meanwhile, the female and animal figurines (the majority of which probably represent horses) from Gibeon and elsewhere fuel debates about when strict monotheism, with a single God worshipped in the Jerusalem Temple, arose in Judah, and the possible widespread persistence of other private ritual practices. But recent research has also shown that the Judean type of female and horse figurines were part of a wave of similar figurine types spread across the Near East in the Neo-Assyrian period and later. This suggests that the great empires also spread religious ideas that were then adapted to local traditions and beliefs. In this highly interconnected world, new tensions arose that pitted cosmopolitan identities against local traditions.

The broken and unspectacular finds from the Gibeon “pool” are tiny fragments of the much larger pattern of Iron Age Judean society that has been painstakingly pieced together and argued over by archaeologists and epigraphers like Pritchard across decades of excavation and study. Though biblical connections capture more headlines, this kind of archaeology is much more typical today and ultimately more instructive about long-term social and economic change and the broader background to the development of the biblical narratives.