Archaeologists identify ancient israelite palace in Jordan

The incised ashlar blocks unearthed at the biblical site of Mahanaim, just east of modern Dayr Allah in Jordan, are likely remains from the time when the Kingdom of Israel ruled over part of this region, the researchers say.

The study, published in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University on Wednesday, identifies the artifacts by comparing their iconography to drawings found at another well-known Israelite site in Sinai.

The study contributes to our understanding of the history and art of the Kingdom of Israel, and sheds light on the significance of key biblical narratives that are set in and around Mahanaim. These include the story of the patriarch Jacob wrestling with an angel of God and, as a result, being given a new name: Israel (Genesis 32:22-31).

To be clear, no one is proclaiming that evidence has been found confirming the historicity of this or other biblical narratives linked to this region. Rather, the evidence of a strong administrative Israelite presence in Transjordan helps us understand why key foundational biblical stories were set in this area, say the study's authors, Prof. Israel Finkelstein of Haifa University and Prof. Tallay Ornan of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Twin peaks

This study centers on two adjacent mounds occupying a loop in the Zarka River, some six kilometers east of where it flows into the Jordan. The western hill, known today as Tall adh-Dhahab al-Gharbi, hosts remains of an ancient town occupied during multiple periods in antiquity, and it is here that the incised blocks were found. Across the river is Tall adh-Dhahab al-Sharqi, which has sparser archaeological remains, possibly from a single ancient shrine.

For more than a century, scholars have identified the Zarka as the biblical Jabbok, the tributary of the Jordan described as flowing through the Gilead, the name the Bible gives to this region of Transjordan. They have also identified the twin mounds of al-Gharbi and al-Sharqi, as, respectively, the biblical town of Mahanaim and the adjacent temple of Penuel.

Mahanaim (meaning "two camps" in Hebrew) was supposedly named thusly by Jacob (Genesis 32:2), who also christened the adjacent hill Penuel (Genesis 32:30) after his fight with the angel, as it was there that he saw the panim (face) of "El" (God).

Mahanaim is also where, according to the Bible, Saul's son Ishbaal was crowned to briefly rule over part of Israel as a rival to David (2 Samuel 2:8). Later it also served as a refuge for David himself as he fled the rebellion of his son Absalom (2 Samuel 17:24-29).

A word of caution must be sounded again: identifying the names of biblical places like Mahanaim or Penuel doesn't necessarily say anything about the historicity of biblical stories that take place there. It simply means that – based on the geography, the modern names of the sites, the biblical descriptions and the archaeological or historical evidence – scholars think that these are the real locations that the authors and readers of the Bible would have had in mind as a setting for their stories.

Whether those narratives contain a grain of history is a whole other ball game. To make a comparison, we can securely identify the ruins of Troy and Mycenae, but that doesn't mean that Greeks and Trojans really fought a 10-year war over a woman called Helen sometime during the Bronze Age.

So what does archaeology say about the real history of Mahanaim? The mound was excavated in 2005-2011 by a German expedition, which found remains mainly from the Hellenistic Period and the Iron Age (which roughly corresponds to the First Temple Period in the biblical chronology).

The archaeologists, led by Prof. Thomas Pola of Dortmund University, unearthed a group of large decorated sandstone blocks, some weighing up to 200 kilograms. Some of the blocks were reused in a later Hellenistic building and others were found lying on the slope. It is surmised that they all came from a monumental Iron Age structure that has yet to be fully uncovered.

David disclaimer

It is these blocks, and particularly the faint and fragmentary depictions inscribed upon them, that are the focus of the new study by Finkelstein and Ornan. Based on the style of the decorations, the scholars date the remains to the first half of the eighth century B.C.E. This was the time of maximum expansion of the Kingdom of Israel, which stretched from Sinai to modern-day Lebanon in the reigns of Joash and his son Jeroboam II.

Here we are referring to the Kingdom of Israel, also known as the Northern Kingdom, which had its capital in Samaria (just outside modern-day Nablus, in the West Bank) and was a major regional power until its destruction and incorporation into the Assyrian empire around 720 B.C.E.

For much of the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.E., Israel directly or indirectly ruled over large swathes of the Levant, including parts of Transjordan, as well its own southern neighbor, Judah, which had its capital in Jerusalem. Whether the two Israelite kingdoms, the northern and the southern, were previously joined in a great United Monarchy under David and Solomon, as the Bible claims, remains hotly debated.

Most scholars, including Finkelstein – a leading voice in the camp that takes a more critical approach to the historicity of the Bible – believe the two reigns developed separately.

There is no evidence for a vast united Israelite empire in the 10th century B.C.E., when David and Solomon supposedly reigned, and their small kingdom of Judah was later aggrandized by the biblical authors, these scholars conclude.

For whom the bell rings

In any case, the finds from Mahanaim are dated to a time that is around two centuries after David and Solomon's supposed reign, and right in the heyday of the Northern Kingdom.

"When I looked at the faint incisions on these ten inscribed blocks, from a thematic point of view, a bell rang," says Ornan, who is a top expert on ancient Near Eastern art. "And that bell was ringing for Ajrud."

Ornan is referring to Kuntillet Ajrud, a small Israelite outpost located in eastern Sinai, more than 250 kilometers (155 miles) from Mahanaim. Ajrud, which was excavated in the 1970s, is known for the inscriptions, murals and decorated jars that were found within its walls. These artifacts have already given scholars rare insight into the religious beliefs of the ancient Israelites, which were very different from those later prescribed by the Bible. Most known is perhaps the figurative depiction that some scholars believe to be of Yahweh, accompanied by a female deity, Asherah, who was possibly believed to be God's wife.

But the Ajrud drawings also contain more mundane scenes, which find an echo in the inscribed blocks from Mahanaim, Ornan says. For example, two of the blocks found in Jordan contain fragmentary traces of a banquet scene, depicting a lyre player, possibly entertaining diners, and a man carrying a goat to supply the feast. The lyre player can be compared to a sketch of a figure playing a similar instrument found on a jar at Ajrud, Ornan says. Fragmentary scenes of a lion hunt and horses in Mahanaim also find parallels in the drawings of these animals at the site in Sinai, she says.

And finally, both sites host a depiction of a Voluted Tree, a stylized palm tree with curled up branches. Also known as the Tree of Life, this was an important religious symbol across the Levant, an icon of fertility and protection from evil, Ornan says. Voluted palm fronds were also carved on the so-called proto-Aeolic capitals that adorned the palaces of the Israelite and Judahite monarchies, she adds.

All this suggests that the remains from Mahanaim can be assigned to the same entity that, at the time, controlled both Ajrud and this part of Transjordan, that is, the Kingdom of Israel, Ornan and Finkelstein conclude.

Commonality in Canaan

It should be noted that the iconography found on the blocks of Mahanaim is considered quite common across the Near East, and can broadly be described as Syro-Hittite imagery. But the closest parallels, besides at Ajrud, can be found far to the north, in northern Syria and southern Turkey, Ornan notes.

Theoretically, the structure at Mahanaim could have been built by a more northern entity, such as the Arameans from Damascus, but our knowledge of the geopolitical context makes this unlikely, Finkelstein says. We know, from both the Bible and extrabiblical texts, that Aramean power didn't extend this far south into Transjordan during the first half of the eighth century B.C.E., he notes. The Assyrian empire too would only come to control the region decades later, he adds. This leaves the Israelite monarchy as the most probable builder of the structure at Mahanaim.

If correct, this would tell us a lot about the art and culture of Northern Kingdom, Ornan says. The standardized use, from Mahanaim to Ajrud, of artistic conventions and symbols that were common throughout the Near East strongly suggests that the Israelites were very much part of the broader artistic and cultural milieu of ancient Canaan, she says.

This matches what scholars know about the culture and beliefs in the First Temple Period: the Israelites believed in multiple deities and loved a good graven image as much as their neighbors. Monotheism, image aversion and the observance of many other biblical laws that are the signposts of Judaism as we know it were a later evolution.

Most scholars today agree that the Bible itself was compiled and edited over a very long period. There is also broad agreement that it was at least partly based on texts or traditions that originated in the First Temple Period, and some of these may reflect the realities of the time of Jeroboam II. That is why the putative discovery of this major Israelite investment in the eighth century B.C.E. at Mahanaim can offer us insight into the key biblical traditions that are set in this area, Finkelstein says.

After all, the hub of the Northern Kingdom was to the west of the Jordan, in Samaria and the fertile Jezreel Valley. So one is left wondering why a foundational story of this nation, when its patriarch Jacob is given the name Israel, is set in a fairly distant land.

The answer may mostly relate to the geopolitics of the ninth-eighth centuries B.C.E.

Making history

At the time, Israel was vying for hegemony over Transjordan and the rest of the Levant with multiple other powers: the already-mentioned Arameans, the Ammonites, the Moabites and others. Gilead, the region just east of the Jordan River, changed hands several times, and Israelite control there lasted for almost a century, divided into two spans of a few decades. An initial period, in the mid ninth century B.C.E., was under the formidable Omride dynasty, which first transformed Israel into a major power.

This period of hegemony was interrupted by the Aramean invasion of Israel led by Hazael, king of Aram-Damascus, around 840 B.C.E. In Transjordan, the Moabite ruler, Mesha, took advantage of this setback and boasted in an inscription about defeating the Israelites and reconquering lost territory.

Israel recovered its hold on Gilead in the early eighth century B.C.E. under the so-called Nimshide dynasty, particularly under Jeroboam II, and it was at this time that the putative palace at Mahanaim was built.

And just like building a monumental structure is a way of claiming ownership of a piece land, so is creating a historical link to that region. This could explain why the foundational myth of Jacob/Israel was set in the area of Mahanaim and Penuel, Finkelstein and Ornan posit.

"When Israelite political dominance was established there for a certain time, they needed to legitimize it by 'making history', and that's the narrative that eventually made its way into Bible," Ornan tells Haaretz in a phone interview.

The biblical stories that link David to Mahanaim may also have been inspired by the brief Israelite presence in Jordan, Finkelstein adds. While there is no evidence that Judah's power extended to Transjordan in the 10th century B.C.E., in David's time, whoever eventually compiled the biblical stories of the United Monarchy may have 'telescoped' back in time the geopolitical realities of the eighth century B.C.E. to aggrandize the mythical Davidic empire ruled from Jerusalem, he says.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that David, fleeing from Absalom's revolt, is described in the Bible as being received at Mahanaim with a great feast, (2 Samuel 17:27-29) just like the one that once adorned the stone blocks found there.

Of course, these banquet scenes were ubiquitous in the period's art, so we have no idea if the biblical scribes ever saw or heard of these specific decorations at Mahanaim, but it is yet another telltale sign that the Bible's imagery and narrative are filled with elements that have been projected back into an earlier time.

"Again, we are not saying that David was there," Ornan says. "We are not taking the Bible at face value, we are drilling into it and trying to understand its political and historical context."

A touchy discovery

As mentioned, it's not really news that the Northern Kingdom periodically ruled parts of Transjordan in the ninth-eighth century B.C.E., given that this specific part of the biblical narrative is confirmed by contemporary historical sources. But the possibility of an Israelite monumental construction found in Jordan is still liable to be a sensitive political issue, particularly amidst the ongoing Gaza war, and Jordan may hesitate about enabling further investigation of the site.

Pola, the German biblical scholar who led the original excavation at Mahanaim, did not respond to repeated emails from Haaretz seeking comment.

The comparison between the iconography at Ajrud and Mahanaim is "convincing," says Thomas Römer, a professor at the College de France and the University of Lausanne and a leading expert in the Hebrew Bible who was not involved in the study. Equally compelling is the suggestion of a link between this putative Israelite construction at Mahanaim in the time of Jeroboam II and the biblical narrative of Jacob, Römer tells Haaretz by email.

"The best way to get more information would be to launch a new season of excavation, but this is, politically speaking, not the moment," he says. "I am convinced by their argumentation and would support their conclusion, hoping that one day it will be possible to launch a new dig."

Ariel David