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Photo: Yadid Levy<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Beneath a desert in Israel, a scholar and his team are unearthing astonishing new evidence of an advanced society in the time of the biblical Solomon<\/strong><\/p>\n Matti Friedman<\/strong><\/p>\n If you stand on one of the outcroppings of the Timna valley, the most salient fact of the place is emptiness. Here in the heat-blasted flatlands of the Arava Desert, off a lonely road in southern Israel, it seems there\u2019s nothing but stark cliffs and rock formations all the way to the jagged red wall of the Edomite Mountains across the Jordanian border. And yet the longer you spend in the Timna barrens, the more human fingerprints you begin to see. Scratches on a cliff face turn out to be, on closer investigation, 3,200-year-old hieroglyphics. On a boulder are the outlines of ghostly chariots. A tunnel vanishes into a hillside, the walls marked with the energetic strikes of bronze chisels. There were once people here, and they were looking for something. Traces of the treasure can still be seen beneath your feet, in the greenish hue of pebbles or the emerald streak across the side of a cave.<\/p>\n When the Israeli archaeologist Erez Ben-Yosef arrived at the ancient copper mines of Timna, in 2009, he was 30 years old. The site wasn\u2019t on Israel\u2019s archaeological A-list, or even its B-list. It wasn\u2019t the Jerusalem of Jesus, or the famous citadel of Masada, where Jewish rebels committed suicide rather than surrender to Rome. It was the kind of place unimportant enough to be entrusted to someone with fresh credentials and no experience leading a dig.<\/p>\n At the time, Ben-Yosef wasn\u2019t interested in the Bible. His field was paleomagnetism, the investigation of changes in the earth\u2019s magnetic field over time, and specifically the mysterious \u201cspike\u201d of the tenth century B.C., when magnetism leapt higher than at any time in history for reasons that are not entirely understood. With that in mind, Ben-Yosef and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego unpacked their shovels and brushes at the foot of a sandstone cliff and started digging.<\/p>\n They began to extract pieces of organic material\u2014charcoal, a few seeds, 11 items all told\u2014and dispatched them to a lab at Oxford University for carbon-14 dating. They didn\u2019t expect any surprises. The site had already been conclusively dated by an earlier expedition that had uncovered the ruins of a temple dedicated to an Egyptian goddess, linking the site to the empire of the pharaohs, the great power to the south. This conclusion was so firmly established that the local tourism board, in an attempt to draw visitors to this remote location, had put up kitschy statues in \u201cwalk like an Egyptian\u201d poses.<\/p>\n But when Ben-Yosef got the results back from Oxford they showed something else\u2014and so began the latest revolution in the story of Timna. The ongoing excavation is now one of the most fascinating in a country renowned for its archaeology. Far from any city, ancient or modern, Timna is illuminating the time of the Hebrew Bible\u2014and showing just how much can be found in a place that seems, at first glance, like nowhere.<\/p>\n[Read the rest here<\/a>.]\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Photo: Yadid Levy An Archaeological Dig Reignites the Debate Over the Old Testament\u2019s Historical Accuracy Beneath a desert in Israel, a scholar and his team are unearthing astonishing new evidence of an advanced society in the time of the biblical Solomon Matti Friedman If you stand on one of the outcroppings of the Timna valley, the most salient fact …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1229,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions\/1229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}An Archaeological Dig Reignites the Debate Over the Old Testament\u2019s Historical Accuracy<\/h1>\n
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