1.1.1 The Early Bronze Age II–III (ca. 3100–2500 BCE)

The antiquity of the ruins encountered by those living in the first millennium BCE could be considerable, reaching back into even the Neolithic and Chalcolithic eras, when some of the first settlements in the region, such as that at Jericho, were founded. But many of the oldest ruins still visible to the biblical writers would have descended from the Early Bronze Age (EBA) II–III periods (ca. 3100–2300 BCE). Around 3100 BCE a new settlement network appeared for the first time in the history of the southern Levant, one characterized, as Raphael Greenberg describes it, by a “permanent, fortified entity separated from its surroundings.”Footnote ³⁹ Some of these early locations were marked by simple mud-brick walls set on stone foundations – a type of architecture that was either replaced in later centuries or slowly weathered over time.

But at certain sites more impressive fortifications persisted. At Tell el-Far’ah (North) (biblical Tirzah), a stone rampart was positioned alongside an older mud-brick one in the EBA II period, creating walls 6m thick that were further augmented with a city gate flanked by towers that reached 7m high.Footnote ⁴⁰At Tel Beth Yerah, located just southwest of the Sea of Galilee, three successive walls enclosed an impressive 20ha settlement with paved streets situated on a grid pattern.Footnote ⁴¹ And the EBA fortifications at Tel Yarmuth (biblical Jarmuth) exceed even these.Footnote ⁴² In the most expansive EBA fortification system unearthed from the region, an initial stone wall came to be modified in time to include another enclosure built 20–30m in front of it, creating a massive rampart that stretched to 40m wide in certain sections. In the final phase of the EBA site, monumental stone platforms were placed in the space between the two walls, most likely supporting citadels or large towers that helped guard the city. To this day, the plastered, outer wall stands to a height of 7m.Footnote ⁴³

7 Map of sites of ruins discussed in this study.

Author map

Tel Yarmuth is of particular interest because it is abandoned at the end of the EBA period and left to ruin. Around a thousand years later the acropolis of the site experiences some traces of settlement activity and more definite architectural features in the Iron I period, but the extensive lower city bears few indications of rebuilding after it was deserted.Footnote ⁴⁴ The small Late Bronze Age (LBA) and Iron Age communities that existed at the location would have therefore lived among the ruins of the imposing EBA center, including the remains of the impressive Palace B and the old fortifications that enclosed this lower area of the city.Footnote ⁴⁵ For these later residents who came to live atop the ruin mound, daily affairs would have been shaped by the monumental debris left behind from communities who had settled Tel Jarmuth a thousand years before, and whose building projects and public architecture far exceeded what early Iron Age communities were able to muster.

Encounters such as these with ruins from an EBA past would have been a widespread phenomenon among later populations in the southern Levant. The large city of Tel Beth Yerah mentioned above, for example, is abandoned for over 2,000 years, apart from a brief moment in the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) period when archaeological evidence suggests that a potter’s community plied their trade among the ruins from many centuries before.Footnote ⁴⁶ The impressive site of Tell es Sakan, located just south of Gaza near the Mediterranean coast, is similarly abandoned after the EBA when new settlements are founded nearby within view of its ruins.Footnote ⁴⁷ To the east, Khirbet ez-Zeraqun, situated on the Irbid Plateau in the Transjordan region and protected by walls over 3m thick, shares a similar fate, being abandoned along with its palace around 2700 BCE and never resettled.Footnote ⁴⁸

That these EBA ruins left an impression on later populations is evident in the fact that a number of these sites are referred to in the Hebrew Bible. Jarmuth, for example, is characterized in the Book of Joshua as one of the great Amorite cities of Canaan (Josh 10:3, 5, 23; 12:11; 15:35; 21:29) even though the location would have only been a modest town in the Iron Age and Persian period when the biblical stories about it were first written and revised. Two other EBA settlements also mentioned in the Hebrew Bible stand out. The first is the city of Arad, situated at the site of Tel Arad in the eastern Negev region and referred to in a number of biblical texts that describe it as a prominent Canaanite city (i.e., Num 21:1; 33:40; Josh 12:14; Judges 1:16). Over the course of eighteen seasons of excavation a large EBA settlement came into view at the location, its community flourishing in conjunction with the copper trade that passed by it during these centuries.Footnote ⁴⁹ EBA Arad was enclosed by an impressive double-gated city wall that ran 1,200m in length and featured at least eleven semi-elliptical towers to guard the settlement. One of the great fortified cities of the Levant, Arad oversaw a key trade route that coursed through the region.

8 Tel Arad. Ruins of Iron Age fortress (background) and Bronze Age Arad (foreground).

Wikimedia Commons. Released into the public domain by its author, אסף.צ at the Wikipedia Project

But as with those other EBA locations, Arad was finally abandoned around 2600 BCE and was not resettled for over 1,500 years, until, ca. 950 BCE, a small Iron Age community arose amid its ruins.Footnote ⁵⁰ The LBA city referred to at moments in the Hebrew Bible, much like the city of Jarmuth, did not then exist. But what was present at these locations were monumental ruins from an EBA past.

A similar relationship between ruins and biblical storytelling occurs in conjunction with the site of ’Ai (et-Tell). Situated 15km to Jerusalem’s northeast and mentioned in a number of biblical texts, ’Ai features most prominently in an extended narrative in Josh 7–8 that recounts how it was destroyed by Israelite forces. As with other EBA cities, ’Ai was settled initially in the EBA I era and subsequently grew into a large, fortified location at the beginning of the EBA II period.Footnote ⁵¹ Remains of monumental public architecture, both palaces and temples, were located on the acropolis of the city, and in time the walls of ’Ai expanded in successive building phases to become 8m wide. During this time, ’Ai was the principal city of a region that, a thousand years later, Jerusalem would come to control.

9 Bronze Age ruins of Tel Yarmuth.

Bukvoed, photograph. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license

Yet – much like Jarmuth, Arad, and other EBA centers – ’Ai was destroyed around 2500 BCE and abandoned for well over a thousand years. In the Iron I period a small settlement came to be built on the old terraces along the ruins of the acropolis, but this village was also soon deserted, and ’Ai was never again resettled. The biblical stories told about a great LBA city refer, therefore, to a legendary settlement that was abandoned long before the period when these biblical stories were set. But once more what prevailed at ’Ai when the biblical writers told stories about it were monumental ruins from a distant past – ruins that came to define even the location’s name in Hebrew: ’Ai, the city of “the ruins” (העי), built and fallen long ago.

Remains unearthed across disparate regions of the southern Levant indicate that “prominent ruins” from the EBA “were visible to the inhabitants of the country in later periods,” as Amihai Mazar observes in his overview of this era.Footnote ⁵² The biblical references to Jarmuth, Arad, and ’Ai offer further evidence of this visibility, attesting to how the biblical writers were familiar with the ruins of EBA locations. Their descriptions of these sites as imposing fortified cities suggest that these stories were shaped by the EBA remains that persisted at these locations – the remnants of ancient city walls, palaces, and temples, amid other debris, giving rise to narratives that recounted how these locations had fallen in a more distant past. Though these cities were abandoned at least a thousand years before any biblical text was written down, their monumental ruins left a deep and lasting impression on those later populations who came across them, a point apparent in the fact that the biblical writers told stories about these locations long after their demise. The distance in time between ’Ai’s downfall in the EBA and the Book of Joshua’s story of its destruction likely approached two thousand years, or a similar distance that separates us from the Roman conquest of Britain.

But what these biblical references to EBA cities also reveal is that the actual antiquity of these settlements was lost on their later storytellers. The scribes who composed these narratives appear to have been unaware that the ruins located at these sites preceded even the era of Abraham, according to biblical chronology. None of these accounts, that is, depict EBA cities as sites that came to ruin in the mid-third millennium BCE. Even ’Ai’s name suggests that the original identification of the site fell out of local memory, lost in the millennium that passed after its EBA destruction and abandonment. When stories were told about these ancient locations, the time period when these sites were destroyed was conflated with much later eras, a point to which we will turn below. Unable to distinguish between historical periods on the basis of stratigraphy, as archaeologists do today, the blurred and vague temporal framework attached to these ruins arose because knowledge of how to date these remains did not exist in antiquity, nor, for that matter, did a depth of historical time needed to account for these ancient predecessors.

1.1.2 The Middle Bronze Age II (ca. 1800–1600 BCE)

Though EBA ruins would have been part of the visible landscape of the first millennium BCE in the southern Levant, it is the ruins of the MBA II period that would have been most distinct. “If the second millennium can, in its entirety, be characterized as the Canaanite millennium,” Greenberg writes, “then the MB II must be its high-water mark, in terms of settlement expansion and the flowering of a recognizable and distinct cultural idiom.”Footnote ⁵³ Indeed, what is significant about this era for our purposes is that it represents the “zenith of urban development” in the long Bronze Age period,Footnote ⁵⁴ a timeframe when impressive monumental urban centers emerged that would, at many locations, not be surpassed until the Roman era over fifteen hundred years later.

Among MBA sites, it is once again the ruins of their fortifications that would have been most conspicuous.Footnote ⁵⁵ Mazar comments,Footnote ⁵⁶

The result of these immense construction projects was the utter transformation of the southern Levant’s landscape, where city walls came to be elevated on artificial earthen embankments that rose above the terrain and appeared across the horizon as settlements set on artificial hills.

At Shechem (Tel Balatah), for example, a massive earthen rampart was created by the site’s engineers that still stands to the height of nearly 10m in its northwestern sector.Footnote ⁵⁷ At Hazor, the city expanded to a remarkable 80ha during this time, or roughly twice the size of Vatican City, with its new MBA rampart rising 30m above the plain in which it sits.Footnote ⁵⁸ Timnah (Tel Batash), also situated on a low alluvial plain, had its nearly precise square rampart carefully oriented toward the cardinal directions,Footnote ⁵⁹ and a massive rampart, 70m in width, enclosed the city of Ashkelon on the Mediterranean coast.Footnote ⁶⁰

At other sites, too, including even those of a more modest size, such as Shiloh (Khirbet Seilun) or Tel Nagila, we find the construction of substantial earthen works to support new walls that encircled these settlements.Footnote ⁶¹ The result of these monumental construction projects was a landscape that suddenly featured great mounds, artificially built, on which cities now stood.

10 Tel Lachish, 1936 CE.

G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection. Library of Congress. Public domain

Remains of these monumental cities would have therefore endured long after they had come to ruin. Prominent among these ruins was the cyclopean masonry used to construct city walls. Consisting of stones that could reach 3m in length and over a ton in weight, Hazor, Shechem, Jerusalem, Jericho, and Hebron – among other sitesFootnote ⁶² – all incorporated these massive boulders into walls built during the MBA period, many of which, because of their sheer size, can still be found at these locations today. In addition, new monumental gates and towers were constructed that far outpaced their EBA antecedents in terms of size and the sophistication of their engineering.Footnote ⁶³ Flanking these gates were often large bastions or towers, though both architectural forms could appear throughout the course of a location’s city wall. At Gezer, a half-dozen towers were unearthed along its lengthy MBA enclosure, though it originally included many more,Footnote ⁶⁴ and the remains of a number of impressive towers were also recovered from the MBA fortifications at Beth Shemesh, Hebron, and Jericho.Footnote ⁶⁵

11 Tel Nagila.

Amos Meron, photograph. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 unported

Within the confines of these MBA cities, the ruins of elite residences and temples would have been conspicuous. Frequently built on a monumental scale, such public architecture contributed to the idea of these settlements as an “axis mundi,” Greenberg remarks, “linking the nether worlds to the celestial through the mediation of the man-made (or at least improved) mountain.”Footnote ⁶⁶ At Tel Kabri in the western Galilee region, an elaborate 6,000m² palace, larger than the White House, was constructed in the eastern part of the city and was notable, in part, for its large audience hall adorned with rich frescoes and paintings that bear a relationship to Minoan and Theran forms.Footnote ⁶⁷ Excavations at Lachish have similarly located a large MBA palace with walls 2m thick, ashlar masonry used in its design, and rooms built with cedar wood imported from the far north in Lebanon.Footnote ⁶⁸ Large palatial buildings were similarly located at Aphek, Megiddo, Tell Ajjul, and Jericho, among other sites.Footnote ⁶⁹

12 Cyclopean stones used in Middle Bronze Age II wall and tower. Hebron (Tell er-Rumeideh).

Jeffrey Chadwick, photograph. Used by permission

13 Gezer Stelae.

Mboesch, photograph. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 international license.

Of the temples constructed during this era, the most famous are the migdal or tower-temples that were positioned on raised platforms and could be seen from a great distance.Footnote ⁷⁰ Examples include those unearthed at Hazor, Megiddo, and Shechem, the latter of which had walls 5m wide that supported two large towers at its entrance hall.Footnote ⁷¹ At Tel Haror, located on the Wadi esh-Sharia, a fine temple of similar form had features that were partially preserved in situ because of an earthquake that collapsed the structure. But Hazor stands out, once again, not only for its large “Southern Temple” that stems from this period but also for a cultic precinct located to the southeast of this building that featured more than thirty standing stones in what appears to be an open-air sanctuary.Footnote ⁷² A large open-air sanctuary was also present at Gezer, featuring ten imposing megalithic stelae, some over 3m tall, coordinated along a north-south axis.Footnote ⁷³

For our purposes, the great cities of the MBA find significance because of how their remains left a lasting imprint on the southern Levant’s terrain. Aaron Burke observes how the ruins of this era are distinguished by being “still visible across the landscape,” surviving “like the pyramids of Egypt” four thousand years later due to their “impressive size” and the “enormous quantity of material and labor” that were required for their formation.Footnote ⁷⁴ But, as with the demise of EBA cities, so, too, did the MBA period come to a close through a series of widespread destructions and abandonments, most occurring during the decades around 1600 BCE.Footnote ⁷⁵ At a few sites, such as Aphek,Footnote ⁷⁶ Jaffa,Footnote ⁷⁷ Hazor,Footnote ⁷⁸ and Jerusalem,Footnote ⁷⁹ renewed or continued settlement persisted in the centuries after. Yet, as with a number of EBA settlements, many MBA sites went unoccupied for hundreds of years after their downfall, and some for millennia, leaving their monumental ruins lying largely uninhabited. Geographically, these deserted sites could be found across the southern Levant: The large palatial estate at Tel Kabri is destroyed in the seventeenth century BCE and is not resettled until a small fortress appears in the Iron IIA period some seven centuries later;Footnote ⁸⁰ Tell Nimrin, a prominent site in the Jordan valley located 16km east of Jericho, is abandoned for over five centuries after its MBA destruction;Footnote ⁸¹ and the MBA fortifications at Tel Malhata and Tel Masos, both situated in the Beersheba Valley in the Negev, are also destroyed and deserted for half a millennium.Footnote ⁸²

Yet from the perspective of the biblical writings, the most meaningful MBA site is that of Jericho. Though preceded by a number of earlier settlements in the long history of the location, in the MBA Jericho was rebuilt on a more massive scale, expanding well beyond the confines of the EBA settlements that had once resided there. Like other locations of its time, Jericho came to be encircled by a rampart built of cyclopean stones, creating a fortification line that included the spring on which Jericho was originally founded (’Ain es-Sultan) and which enclosed a large palatial building, termed the “Hyksos Palace” in earlier excavations.Footnote ⁸³ An impressive temple from the Spring Hill area of the settlement has also been recovered just inside the city gate of the upper city, as has a domestic quarter from the lower area of the city.Footnote ⁸⁴

The history of Jericho was nevertheless a volatile one. Destroyed three different times in the MBA, the city was much reduced in the centuries that followed the final assault against it. An administrative text suggests that some activity was carried out at the site a few hundred years later in the fourteenth century BCE,Footnote ⁸⁵ though physical remains of this settlement are modest and much reduced from its previous MBA stature.Footnote ⁸⁶ After this period of occupation, Jericho was again abandoned apart from faint traces of activity in the Iron I period and not rebuilt until sometime in the tenth through ninth centuries BCE, or well over half a millennium after the large MBA city had been destroyed.Footnote ⁸⁷

For the biblical writers, Jericho was therefore a site of ruins. These remains would have descended from successive cities built and destroyed over the course of two thousand years prior to when the biblical stories about the location were first written down. Even the notable late Iron Age settlement that eventually arose at Jericho would have been surrounded by prominent ruins from a MBA past, particularly from the massive rampart and defensive fortifications that had once guarded the city. If the large and monumental city of the LBA portrayed in the famous story about its downfall in the Book of Joshua did not, then, exist (Josh 6), what was apparent at Jericho during the time of the biblical writers were ancient ruins from a distant past.Footnote ⁸⁸ The stories told about the conquest of this site would have been in keeping with those told about the EBA cities whose ruins also gave rise to biblical accounts of how they came to be.

Among locations that continued to be occupied in the centuries after the MBA ended, the ruins of this period would have stood out to later inhabitants. Many such settlements, in fact, were located in the heart of the central hill country where a number of biblical stories are set. Shechem, Shiloh, Bethel, Jerusalem, and Hebron, for example, all contained communities who lived among the ruins left behind from the MBA period. At Shechem, later residents attempted to reuse what they could salvage of the MBA fortification system in the centuries that followed,Footnote ⁸⁹ and recent excavations from Hebron suggest that the large MBA rampart was still in use in the Iron Age II period many centuries later, with new fortification elements added to it at this time.Footnote ⁹⁰ Shiloh’s Iron I community built into the ruins of the MBA wall that encompassed the site to support their new structures,Footnote ⁹¹ and later residents of Jerusalem inhabited a location whose “very large” MBA wall would have been a striking feature of the landscape, attesting to Jerusalem’s importance hundreds of years before Iron Age populations occupied the site.Footnote ⁹² When stories were told about Israel’s early past in Canaan, this is to say, they were often performed and written down in the shadows cast by the ruins of the region’s Middle Bronze Age centers. The impression left by these physical remains is perhaps most evident in the story recalled about the fall of Jericho in Joshua 6 and the miraculous collapse of its great wall. But the lesser-known accounts of the Anakim at Hebron (Num 13:22; Josh 11:21), the covenant renewal ceremony at Shechem (Josh 24), or Samuel’s early career at Shiloh (1 Sam 1–3) were stories also set at sites where monumental ruins from the MBA period endured.Footnote ⁹³ When David conquers Jerusalem (2 Sam 5:6–9), later audiences of this story could have envisioned David surmounting the city’s old walls and occupying what remained of ruined structures from long ago, though these individuals would not have known who was actually responsible for the ruins that were visible at the site or how they came to be. Of the great cities of the MBA, the biblical writers knew little of their origins or their demise.

14 Cyclopean wall. Jericho (Tell es-Sultan), 1900 CE.

G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection. Library of Congress. Public domain

1.1.3 The Late Bronze Age (ca. 1550–1175 BCE)

The settlements that appeared in the centuries that followed the MBA were often much diminished from their predecessors, both in terms of their infrastructure and the size of their populations. The traces these locations left on the landscape of the southern Levant were therefore more sporadic and less evident than those of their predecessors, at moments enclosed within the larger EBA or MBA ruins that surrounded them or lodged at sites that would become more imposing during later centuries. Nevertheless, certain remains from LBA sites would have been visible in the centuries that followed.

Some of these ruins were those left behind from Egyptian rule. During the course of the fifteenth century BCE, Egyptian incursions into the Levant brought much of the region under its control, its jurisdiction continuing for three centuries until Egyptian power finally receded with the waning of the LBA international system of which it was involved.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is a feature of Egyptian policy during this era, however, that, though an Egyptian presence “was pronounced” culturally, it was “structurally limited,” its authority often exercised via intermediaries and local leaders loyal to Egypt rather than through the destruction and reconstruction of locations that Egypt sought to command.Footnote ⁹⁵ The result of this strategy was that the material assemblages found among LBA sites in Canaan could evince an abundance of Egyptian wares or those influenced by them but provide less evidence of more pronounced Egyptian architectural forms.Footnote ⁹⁶

At two sites familiar to the biblical writers, however, the material footprint of Egypt was more apparent. The first is the port city of Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast (Josh 19:46; 2 Chron 2:16; Jonah 1:3; Ezra 3:7). Conquered by the Egyptians during the reign of Thutmose III (ca. 1482–1428 BCE), Jaffa was turned into an Egyptian harbor in the late fifteenth century BCE and remained under Egyptian control for the next three hundred years.Footnote ⁹⁷ Of the remains left behind from the Egyptian garrison stationed there, the most significant known to us is the large gatehouse attached to a fortress that existed at the city during this time. The monumental façade is the most striking feature of this structure, bearing a large inscription of Ramesses II that was positioned along a passageway over 4m high and guarded by two large towers. After its destruction ca. 1125 BCE, the Ramesses Gate area evinces few traces of settlement activity until the Persian Period many centuries later, though some ephemeral Philistine material remains suggest these new inhabitants constituted a “squatter occupation” among the ruins that followed Egyptian withdrawal.Footnote ⁹⁸

The second LBA city that preserved Egyptian ruins is that of Beth-Shean. Located at the confluence of the Jordan River and Jezreel Valley, the site came under Egyptian control in the fifteenth century BCE and was used as the principal administrative center for Egyptian activities in Canaan at the time.Footnote ⁹⁹ In the Ramesside period of the thirteenth century BCE, Beth-Shean was rebuilt on a more monumental scale with new temples, public buildings, and a residential quarter, featuring monuments erected on behalf of Seti I and, later, of Ramesses II. The final phase of the Egyptian center (twelfth century BCE) was characterized by still more widespread Egyptian monuments and inscriptions – “unparalleled elsewhere in Canaan,”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ its excavator observes – that may have been fashioned in an effort to promote strength and authority during a period when Egyptian power was actually under threat.

15 Replica of inscribed Ramses Gate among Egyptian ruins. Jaffa.

Ricardo Tulio Gandelman, photograph. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license.

The twelfth century BCE garrison town would soon fall, but the ruins left behind of the Egyptian center remained: In the eleventh century BCE Canaanite settlement that followed, Egyptian monuments were carefully preserved and situated within and outside the northern temple of the site, including a large statue of Ramesses III, established, perhaps, to venerate the location’s past Egyptian heritage among inhabitants who, nevertheless, were no longer Egyptian.Footnote ¹⁰¹

16 Ruin mound of Beth-Shean (background), ruins of Scythopolis (foreground).

Author photograph

17 Ruins of Late Bronze Age Egyptian governor residence. Beth-Shean.

Author photograph

But the most impressive LBA city is that of Hazor. One of a handful of MBA sites in the southern Levant to escape destruction, the city transitioned into the LBA period rather seamlessly, it appears, and without major disruption.Footnote ¹⁰² The acropolis of the site was, however, reorganized in the LBA, with two of the temples in the ceremonial precinct intentionally put out of use and carefully filled with earth, including the open-air sanctuary of standing stones situated outside of the South Temple, in addition to an earlier palace.Footnote ¹⁰³ In their place a massive ceremonial residence was constructed in Area A of the site, replete with a fine colonnaded courtyard, basalt orthostats that lined the main hall’s inner walls, and cedar beams that were incorporated into the brickwork throughout the structure. Nearby, another monumental building has been unearthed in the adjacent Area M, most likely a further palatial building.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ These grand structures of the acropolis overlooked a city that retained its impressive 80ha size from centuries before, with Hazor easily the largest LBA settlement in the southern Levant.

18 Ruins of entrance to Late Bronze Age ceremonial center. Tel Hazor.

Author photograph

Nevertheless, the public buildings of the upper city came to a fiery end in the latter half of the thirteenth century BCE, at which time the extensive lower city was also abandoned.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Hazor became a monumental city of ruins in the time that followed, its acropolis strewn with remains of its massive buildings and its lower city never reoccupied. When later communities came to the city, they preserved the burnt remains of the acropolis, living among the ruins from centuries before. For five centuries, it appears, “the ruins of the Canaanite palace remained standing as a desolate hilltop,”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ with Hazor’s later residents carefully safeguarding the ruins by prohibiting any new building activity in this area of the site.

The fall of Hazor coincided with the destruction of a number of other LBA sites in the southern Levant, including both Jaffa and Beth-Shean, but also areas of Megiddo, Aphek, and Bethel, among others.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Lachish, the dominant city of the southern Shephelah – and one that flourished under Egyptian influence – also falls around 1130 BCE and is abandoned for over 200 years.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Located to Lachish’s southwest, the fortified site of Tel Nagila is deserted near the same time, later becoming only a “hamlet or village” that was positioned amid the ruins of the old mound.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ At Tell Kitan, located along the west bank of the Jordan River 12km north of Beth-Shean, monumental temples built near the center of the site were of such a size that there was little room for homes at the location, suggesting that the location may have functioned as a “ritual center for the surrounding settlements.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ During the LBA, however, Tell Kitan was destroyed, perhaps by Egyptian forces, and lay in ruins for two thousand years until it was resettled in the Early Arabic period.

At certain locations scattered throughout the southern Levant, then, ruins from the LBA would have been part of the visible landscape for those who lived in the centuries that followed. Some of these sites would have borne the traces of earlier Egyptian involvement in the region, from monuments to past pharaohsFootnote ¹¹¹ to the more ubiquitous Egyptian scarabs, glyptics, faience, and pottery remains. Other locations, such as at Hazor or Tell Kitan, would have enclosed monumental remains that lay undisturbed for many centuries after the LBA ended.

In terms of the biblical writings, two features of the LBA stand out. The first is the complete absence in the Hebrew Bible of references to Egyptian control of Canaan during these centuries. Though the exodus from Egypt is the pivotal narrative of the entire biblical corpus, and though the Hebrew Bible contains a number of stories that are set in the LBA spanning from the Books of Numbers to Judges, there is not a single mention in these writings of an Egyptian presence in the Levant. This omission may be the result of the more ephemeral footprint of the Egyptians in a region that was permitted to act under the impress of local authorities and harbored few monumental Egyptian buildings outside of the administrative centers the Egyptians established. Yet, in light of the lengthy period of Egyptian hegemony in the region, the dearth of allusions to Egyptian rule among the stories told in the Hebrew Bible is remarkable. It may be that knowledge about much of this period, too, was lost by the era when the biblical writings were being formed.Footnote ¹¹² How residents of the region understood the Egyptian ruins they would have come across in the centuries that followed Egyptian withdrawal is not conveyed in these later texts, unless these experiences were somehow woven into the strains of storytelling that pertained to the exodus story, which was said to have taken place centuries before.Footnote ¹¹³

But alongside this absence are faint glimmers of a LBA horizon that perhaps can be discerned in these writings. Stories surrounding Hazor (Josh 11), Shechem (Judges 9), Bethel (Judges 1), and Lachish (Joshua 10), for example, all situate the destruction of these locations, roughly, within the closing moments of the LBA in which they fell. Such narratives do not demonstrate that the biblical stories communicate information about what had once taken place at these sites, particularly given that the agents behind the destruction are historically unknown and that the fall of Hazor and Lachish, to cite only one example, took place a century apart and not months, as the narrative in Joshua 10–11 suggests.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Unlike the ruins of EBA and MBA sites, however, it may be that remnants of a few LBA locations were associated with vague memories of a past that had endured with the ruins and persisted over time at these locations, memories pertaining to a violent end long ago that brought down impressive cities in the region.Footnote ¹¹⁵

1.2.1 The Early Iron Age (Iron I–IIA, ca. 1175–830 BCE)

In the wake of Egyptian withdrawal from the Levant in the twelfth century BCE, the settlements that emerged in the early Iron Age featured predominantly small, unwalled towns and villages set apart from the larger centers located on or near the coastal plain.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The ruins left behind from these sites would have been mostly negligible, therefore, particularly in comparison to monumental Bronze Age remains that persisted throughout the region. And though these centuries would witness unrest, the skirmishes that occurred were typically of a local variety rather than by the design of larger empires, the terrain of the Levant being less marked by these hostilities than by those that would take place in the centuries to follow.

For our purposes, a few ruins from this period are nevertheless meaningful. Megiddo, Shechem, and Bethel, for example, were all destroyed in the Iron I period.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Though Megiddo was quickly resettled, Shechem and Bethel would not be rebuilt for at least a century. And even after, neither settlement would regain its monumental stature from the centuries of the MBA.Footnote ¹¹⁹ At Shiloh, an Iron I community arose on the MBA ruin mound that had been abandoned since the sixteenth century BCE. This Iron Age settlement would be short-lived, however, as it was destroyed in the late eleventh century BCE after perhaps only a few decades of existence.Footnote ¹²⁰ Remnants of other small, abandoned highland sites may have also endured in the region, such as the modest Iron I/early Iron IIA fortress at Khirbet ed-DawwaraFootnote ¹²¹ or the fortification tower at Giloh,Footnote ¹²² both situated not far from Jerusalem but also, like Shiloh, abandoned after this time. Tel Rehov, a comparatively large 10ha settlement located just south of Beth-Shean, falls in the mid-ninth century BCE, and is finally abandoned a century later.Footnote ¹²³ In the Shephelah region further to the west, the fortified site of Khirbet Qeiyafa is destroyed in the early tenth century BCE and is thereafter deserted,Footnote ¹²⁴ and the impressive Iron I city of Ekron falls near the same time, with its extensive lower city not resettled for 250 years.Footnote ¹²⁵

19 Ruins of Early Iron Age gate complex. Khirbet Qeiyafa.

Author photograph

But it is the city of Gath (Tell es-Safi) that would have left behind the most impressive ruins from this era. Located 45km southwest of Jerusalem, Gath flourished during the EBA, MBA, and Iron I–IIA periods.Footnote ¹²⁶ Of these eras, however, it would be during the early Iron Age when Gath would reach its greatest prominence, becoming one of the largest cities of its time at around 40–50ha in size.Footnote ¹²⁷ Recent archaeological evidence suggests that Gath’s status in the early Iron Age was derived from its role in the copper trade that originated in the Arabah region and flowed through the Elah Valley to the coast,Footnote ¹²⁸ in addition to the extensive tracts of agricultural land Gath commanded from atop the hill on which it was positioned, some of which were used for olive oil production.Footnote ¹²⁹ From this perspective, not only was Gath an imposing fortified city during an era when few existed in the southern Levant, but it was also an affluent one.

20 Iron Age fortifications of the lower city in Area D East, Gath (Tell es-Safi).

M. Eniukhina, photograph. Courtesy of the Tell el-Safi Archaeological Project and Aren Maeir. Used by permission

For such reasons, Gath was targeted by the kingdom of Damascus when its ruler, Hazael, swept south in the ninth century BCE and ravaged regions of the southern Levant. After laying siege to the location, the Arameans finally conquered Gath and destroyed it ca. 830 BCE, ending its long history of regional authority.Footnote ¹³⁰ Throughout the site, evidence of Gath’s destruction has been unearthed, where an 80cm layer of ash and debris has preserved vestiges of Gath’s downfall.Footnote ¹³¹ After the Aramean conquest, Gath is abandoned for around a century until a smaller settlement emerges in the upper reaches of the ruined city toward the end of the eighth century BCE. This community, however, is also quickly ended when the Assyrian Empire invades the Levant at this time.Footnote ¹³² Subsequently, Gath is deserted once more and never rebuilt.

The ruins of Gath would lie exposed for centuries after the city was destroyed and abandoned, taking their place among the monumental remains of the great Bronze Age centers that had been overthrown before. Some Bronze Age fortifications at Gath, as at Hebron, appear, in fact, to have continued in use into the Iron Age, making the city’s defenses a composite of formidable architectural features from many centuries.Footnote ¹³³ Aren Maeir writes of how the city’s former status would have been apparent to later visitors, who would have been able to view the “impressive and still visible physical remains of the city’s extent, its massive fortifications, and other architectural features.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Among the wreckage present at the site would have been the remains of these fortifications and the debris of homes left exposed to the windblown sediments that had accumulated on them, the deep trenches and other remains of the siege system implemented by the Arameans at the time of Gath’s fall, and scattered human remains of those who were not buried after Gath was overrun.Footnote ¹³⁵

Gath’s stature before its fall is also apparent in the biblical writings, particularly in relation to stories surrounding David in the Book of Samuel, whose connections with the city of Gath and Gittite individuals form a significant theme in his rise to power (e.g., 1 Sam 21, 27; 2 Sam 6, 15).Footnote ¹³⁶ Gath’s destruction after the long period of its dominance would have been a seismic event in the early Iron Age, demonstrating to later visitors that even the largest and wealthiest of cities in the region could be overrun. Much like references to Shiloh’s former standing (e.g., Josh 18–22; 1 Sam 1–4) or the brief account of Bethel’s capture (Judges 1:22–26), stories connected to early Iron Age locations can be found within the biblical writings, even if the accounts as we have them now are more the creation of the centuries that followed Gath’s destruction than when it stood.Footnote ¹³⁷

But one explanation for the appearance of these narratives is the ruins that prevailed. At both Gath and Shiloh, monumental remains stood among locations otherwise mostly abandoned, both also positioned on key transit routes that cut through the terrain of the southern Levant. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the remains of both sites are referred to explicitly in later biblical texts. In the Book of Amos, for example, the leaders of Israel and Judah are summoned to “go down to Gath of the Philistines” to see what had become of it a century after its fall (Amos 6:2), its great ruins serving as a warning of what might become of Jerusalem and Samaria. Later, the Book of Jeremiah provides a similar directive to visit Shiloh and take in its remains, the already ancient ruins of the city offering a sign of Jerusalem’s impending fate (Jer 7:12).

But what the archaeological record also discloses is that other remains of the early Iron Age left less of an impression on the stories that would be told about this time, particularly of an Iron I (1175–980 BCE) landscape that featured smaller settlements and villages. If Shiloh is recalled as an important settlement in the biblical writings, we are nonetheless never told how Shiloh was destroyed or by whom, nor, for that matter, are we told who resided at the fortresses of Khirbet Qeiyafa, Khirbet ed-Dawwara, or Giloh, or the circumstances surrounding the fall of Iron I Megiddo. Even an event as pivotal as David’s capture of Jerusalem in the early tenth century BCE comes to us in rather cryptic form, voiced in proverbs and difficult sayings that make it challenging to reconstruct how the biblical writers understood David’s acquisition of the city.Footnote ¹³⁸ The impact registered by the ruins of smaller early Iron Age sites on biblical storytelling was often, in this sense, a rather modest one.

1.2.2 The Late Iron Age (Iron IIB–IIC, ca. 830–586 BCE)

The ruins of the late Iron Age mark the final stage of this overview. The remains left behind from this era were the result of two empires and their incursions into the southern Levant that took place a century apart. The first was that of Assyria. Beginning in the mid-eighth century BCE, the Assyrian Empire pursued a more aggressive policy under Tiglath-Pileser III toward lands in the Levant, culminating in the conquest of the kingdoms of Aleppo, Hadrach, and Damascus, among others, during the decade of the 730s BCE.Footnote ¹³⁹ Israel, resisting Assyrian rule alongside Damascus in a coalition they had formed, lost the northern part of its kingdom (Galilee) in 734/733 BCE and, after a subsequent revolt, was finally conquered in 721 BCE.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Left in the wake of the Assyrian advance was a decimated kingdom. Avraham Faust observes that nearly all settlements in Israelite territory “show signs of destruction, damage, and decline, and most did not recover at all.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Of forty-two excavated sites, a full twenty-seven were not reoccupied or were occupied only by a handful of squatters among the ruins after the Assyrian invasion, and a further twelve locations were vastly reduced in size and population in the decades after.Footnote ¹⁴² It appears that well over 90 percent of sites in Israel were affected by the Assyrian campaign, resulting in substantial demographic upheaval and the depopulation of entire regions. For those who journeyed through Israelite lands in the aftermath of Assyria’s attack, the former kingdom would have appeared, as the Book of Jeremiah describes it, like a kingdom “in ruins” (Jer 2:15).

The fallen remains of this territory would have been apparent in all quarters of its former holdings. The city of Hazor is destroyed once more at this time and evinces only “sporadic” occupation in the subsequent centuries, with a few later residents constructing poor, flimsy homes among the wreckage of the ancient city.Footnote ¹⁴³ Beth-Shean is set aflame and is not settled again until the Hellenistic period half a millennium later.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Bethel, too, is “sparsely settled”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ after the Assyrian advance, being rebuilt on a larger scale only centuries later during the Hellenistic period. After being subdued, Dan, Megiddo, and Tirzah are rebuilt and reoccupied afterward, though what dominates these locations are large Assyrian residences constructed by the victors to oversee the region.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Two decades later, the Assyrians would attack Judah. Spurred once more by revolt among their vassals in the southern Levant, the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib invaded territories in Phoenicia, Philistia, and Judah in the final years of the eighth century BCE to bring them back into the Assyrian orbit.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The campaign in Judah was particularly devastating. In the fertile Shephelah region in the western part of the kingdom, Sennacherib claims to have destroyed forty-six fortified settlements in an inscription recounted about this campaign. Azekah,Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Beth-Shemesh,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ and Tel Eton (Eglon),Footnote ¹⁵⁰ among others, all bear witness to Sennacherib’s invasion. The most prominent site to be overrun was, however, that of Lachish,Footnote ¹⁵¹ with its grim downfall depicted among the famous reliefs found in the Assyrian royal palace at Nineveh.Footnote ¹⁵²

21 Assyrian siege of Lachish relief panel, Southwest Palace. Nineveh.

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 international (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. © The Trustees of the British Museum

But it would be the Babylonian Empire that would finally bring Judah and its royal center, Jerusalem, to an end.Footnote ¹⁵³ With the fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE and the defeat of Egypt at the battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE, Babylon took control of the Levant, including the kingdom of Judah, which was made its vassal. After a rebellion by the Judahite king, Jehoiakim, the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem in 597 BCE, resulting in the deportation of an elite contingent of the city’s residents but not in the destruction of the city itself. Ten years later, a further rebellion brought Babylon to the gates of Jerusalem once more. This time, the city was not spared. Archaeological evidence for the destruction of Jerusalem has been found throughout different areas of the ancient city,Footnote ¹⁵⁴ from the Jewish Quarter excavationsFootnote ¹⁵⁵ to a number of sites unearthed in the City of David.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ As the biblical description of the destruction suggests (2 Kings 25; Jer 39), much of Jerusalem was burned to the ground at the time and its fortifications dismantled. The royal city that had stood for over a thousand years in the highlands was, finally, laid waste.

22 Ruins of Iron Age pillared house. Jerusalem.

Author photograph

In addition to Jerusalem, large swaths of Judah were also either destroyed or abandoned, joining those ruined sites in the Shephelah that had been devastated a century before. Consequently, nearly every Judahite settlement was affected during these late Iron Age invasions, from the lowlands in the west to the central hills south of Jerusalem to fortified settlements located still further south in the Negeb region. Hebron,Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Arad,Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Lachish,Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Jericho,Footnote ¹⁶⁰ and En-GediFootnote ¹⁶¹ were all destroyed or abandoned near the time of Jerusalem’s downfall, with much more modest populations reoccupying these ruined sites in the century after. To the far southwest, Kadesh Barnea is overrun,Footnote ¹⁶² and, across the Jordan to the east, the city of Heshbon also falls,Footnote ¹⁶³ both of which are sparsely settled in the Persian period. But other locations were abandoned far longer. The southern fortresses of AroerFootnote ¹⁶⁴ and Horvat Uza,Footnote ¹⁶⁵ for example, were deserted for many centuries after Judah’s end. The result of the Babylonian campaign was that most of the Iron Age kingdom of Judah, save the settlements just to the north of Jerusalem in the Benjamin region, was destroyed and depopulated. Demographically, the territories of Judah were so depleted that they would not recover to their former Iron Age levels for five hundred years. Much like Israel after the Assyrian campaigns of the late eighth century BCE, Judah also became a land of ruins.

The devastation wrought by the Assyrian and Babylonian empires brought the era of the Iron Age to a close. To those living in the time that followed, the landscape of the southern Levant must have appeared forlorn, its terrain featuring scores of ruined settlements that had arisen over the course of the previous two thousand years. Many of the biblical references to ruins are informed by this late Iron Age era of widespread destruction, including those in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, whose visions often surround Jerusalem’s fall. Descriptions of Jerusalem’s ruins are, in fact, the most abundant in the biblical corpus, found in the Books of Kings, Lamentations, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Haggai, Nehemiah, Ezra, and certain Psalms. In the Book of Nehemiah, written at least 150 years after the Babylonian campaign, Jerusalem is portrayed as still “in ruins” and its gates “burned with fire” (Neh 2:3, 17).

1.3.1 Ruins and the “Temporalization of History”

Such points of affinity, however, give way to a key disparity between how ruins are represented in the Hebrew Bible and our current understanding of them. Already in the discussion of Bronze Age sites in Sections 1.1.1 and 1.1.2, it became apparent that the biblical stories of Arad or Jericho’s downfall, for example, were fundamentally at odds with how we now date the destruction of these locations. Though these Bronze Age settlements and a number of others referred to in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Jarmuth, ’Ai, Shechem, Hebron) came to ruin at various moments in the EBA and MBA periods, the biblical accounts collapse some fifteen hundred years of ruination into essentially one era – that of the LBA II period (ca. thirteenth–twelfth centuries BCE) – when, according to accounts in the Books of Numbers, Joshua, and Judges, the Israelites conquered and settled the land of Canaan. This tendency to locate so many sites of ruin to a particular LBA horizon is all the more arresting in light of the fact that EBA and MBA sites would often have been more impressive than those that had appeared during later centuries. The thirteenth through twelfth centuries BCE were not some watershed moment, in other words, that witnessed the downfall of numerous monumental cities whose remains displaced or sublimated what had survived from earlier eras. If one period were to be singled out for its ruins, we would expect it to be located by the biblical writers in the centuries of the MBA. But of the ruins from this era, the Hebrew Bible says little.

How we date the ruins of ancient settlements in the southern Levant often diverges from how the biblical writers account for these remains. Rather than locating ruins in distinct ages that stretch ever further back in history (EBA, MBA, etc.), as is our practice, the biblical writings tend toward a more uniform vision.Footnote ¹⁷³ Apart from those late Iron Age destructions that occurred closer to the time when these texts were initially produced, the more venerable remains described in the Hebrew Bible occupy a temporal framework that frequently resists our manner of sequencing. Even sites that we know had been destroyed more recently, such as Kadesh Barnea and Heshbon in the late Iron Age, could be cast back in time by the biblical writers (Josh 10:41; Num 21:25–30) so as to correspond to that late LBA horizon when so many other settlements were said to have been destroyed. Accounts of Shechem’s downfall (Judges 9) or Bethel’s (Judges 1:22–26), furthermore, can have an almost timeless quality about them, devastated long ago, according to biblical storytelling, but without reference to a specific chronological marker that would help us situate these stories in time. The result of this practice is that ruins from EBA, MBA, LBA, and even certain Iron Age contexts appear as the outcome of one epoch.

What becomes clear when reading the biblical references to ruins is that the time attributed to them by the biblical writers can depart substantially from how we conceive of their duration. If we theorize this point of disconnect, what is absent in these ancient accounts is a more acute sense of what Reinhart Koselleck, in his study of the semantics of historical time, terms the “temporalization of history” (Verzeitlichung der Geschichte).Footnote ¹⁷⁴ By this phrase, Koselleck describes a perspective in which time “gains a historical quality,”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ as he puts it, defined not according to the movement of heavenly bodies or the reigns of rulers, as was frequently done in antiquity, but of human developments that could be distinguished as time advanced. Conceiving of time in this manner afforded the possibility of locating human activity “in time,” so to speak, whether our interest lay in technology (i.e., the Neolithic period), politics (i.e., the Roman Empire), culture (i.e., the Renaissance), or some amalgamation of these interests and others. Crucially, what this framework afforded was the possibility of discerning discontinuities in lived experience that arose between eras, guided by the conviction that successive ages could be differentiated from what had preceded them and what would come after, including one’s own. When we situate the biblical writings in the Iron Age, Persian Period, or Hellenistic era, we are driven by this assumption, one that holds that these epochs are separate, distinct, and identifiable. But this outlook would have held little meaning to the biblical writers themselves.

For Koselleck, the key assumption that we share is that as the centuries progress significant transformations occur in lived experience. The forward flow of time is for us a “dynamic and historical force in its own right,”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Koselleck comments, producing futures that we presume will be far different from the presents we happen to occupy. This premise is informed by our own space of experience (Erfahrungsraum) that has given rise to the belief that what the future holds (Erwartungshorizont) is unforeseeable, made uncertain by rapid technological and social developments.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ To cite one small example of the phenomenon that Koselleck details, those of us born in the 1980s began our childhood educations in classrooms with typewriters and chalkboards, and now as adults we conduct classes fully online through technology that even a decade ago would have been unimaginable.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The pace of change has been breathtaking. And we are conditioned to assume that other advancements will soon take hold, further fracturing past experiences from future ones.

But this sense of the relationship between past and present has not always been so. In the opening pages to Futures Past, Koselleck draws our attention to the famous portrait of the Alexanderschlacht by Albrecht Altdorfer (1529 CE). What is curious about this painting is how images of sixteenth century CE combatants from the Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires are found fighting alongside fourth century BCE Persian and Macedonian forces.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

23 Alexanderschlacht. Albrecht Altdorfer, 1529.

Public domain

The effect of this rendering, Koselleck writes, is an impression of time in which the “present and the past were enclosed within a common historical plane,” producing an image of the ancient Battle of Issus that was “at once historical and contemporary” for Altdorfer’s audience.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ To further this temporal effect, statistics of those who fell in battle are detailed in faint numbered columns that appear on banners, but one number is omitted: the year the Battle of Issus actually took place (333 BCE). Altdorfer’s “battle thus is not only contemporary,” Koselleck comments, but also “simultaneously appears to be timeless.”Footnote ¹⁸¹

Yet it is precisely the “timelessness” of Altdorfer’s work that is so jarring to those of us who view it today. Though Altdorfer was aware that the Battle of Issus took place long ago in regions far away from Vienna, his painting is often indifferent to such matters of historical context. Depictions of Alexander, Darius, battle formations, and dress are instead clearly transposed onto a sixteenth century CE setting. “Temporal difference was not more or less arbitrarily eliminated,” Koselleck remarks on this feature of Altdorfer’s portrait. “It was not, as such, at all apparent.”Footnote ¹⁸² Past and present are woven tightly together in this portrayal, bound without regard for the obvious historical inaccuracies that would inevitably arise through such a depiction or for the concerns of misrepresentation that might occur. To our knowledge, none of Altdorfer’s contemporaries were troubled by the manifest historical errors that were strewn throughout the painting. But when Friedrich Schlegel comes across the portrait three centuries later, he is astonished at the “marvel” of Altdorfer’s work, of how it captured the mindset of a previous age that no longer existed. “[T]here was for Schlegel, in the three hundred years separating him from Altdorfer, more time,” Koselleck writes, “than appeared to have passed in the eighteen hundred years or so that lay between the Battle of Issus and his painting.”Footnote ¹⁸³

The Alexanderschlacht becomes meaningful for our study because it represents a perspective of time similar to that found in the biblical portrayals of ruins. In both, temporal difference is effectively elided by collapsing distinct eras into a vision that is more uniform. The biblical description of Arad’s destruction (ca. 2500 BCE), for example, as occurring near the same time as Hazor’s (ca. 1250 BCE) and Heshbon’s (ca. 600 BCE), produces a narrative effect that is akin to Altdorfer’s portrait and his blurring of Hellenistic and late Medieval worlds. In these renderings, historical disparities between time periods are effaced in a manner that is noticeable to us today who are sensitive to these differences, we who are aware of the many dissimilarities that would have separated fourth century BCE Persian forces from sixteenth century CE Ottoman fighters, or who date the ruins of cities in the southern Levant to much different centuries in time on the basis of variations in their material remains. But in both the biblical narrative and in Altdorfer’s portrait, this temporalization of history is absent.

Less absorbed with the asymmetries in lived experience that arise as time unfolds, Koselleck’s theory of temporalization offers a constructive explanation for the disinterest expressed in the biblical writings about those who had once inhabited the ruins they describe. Nowhere in these ancient texts, that is, is there any indication that one could examine these remains to discover how cultic practices or the design of buildings, beliefs about the dead or the defense of settlements, food consumption or the production of textiles, may have been practiced and experienced differently in the past. To be sure, various biblical accounts can refer to those who once resided at destroyed sites as being distinct from Israelite populations, presumably carrying out cultural and religious practices that were believed to deviate from the biblical writers’ own. But at no place in these texts do we read of the possibility, much less the act, of digging among ruined sites to learn about those who had once resided at Jericho or ’Ai or Shiloh.

But this idea is so commonplace to us that we rarely reflect on why we hold to it, or when it came to be. Our lack of reflection on this development is in some sense an outcome of the incredible success of archaeological fieldwork over the past two centuries, in which manifest differences between populations have been revealed again and again. These remains attest to how the affairs of small highland settlements of the Iron I period, to cite one example, were quite distinct from those in the larger MBA cities that preceded them or, again, from the late Iron Age centers that would emerge hundreds of years later.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Apart from brief comments on sporadic religious reforms, the biblical writers, however, rarely discuss broader social or cultural changes that had transpired during these centuries, and never do they draw attention to idiosyncratic or peculiar material artifacts – an Egyptian inscription in Jerusalem, a cyclopean stone at Shechem – that would suggest past experiences at odds with the present. When celebrants walk by a “house of David” in Jerusalem in the Book of Nehemiah (Neh 12:37), no mention is made of how this structure would have been at least five centuries old when the procession occurs, a remnant of a past world that had been mostly lost by the time of Nehemiah’s governorship. The Jerusalem temple was refurbished on a number of occasions according to a collection of biblical texts,Footnote ¹⁸⁵ but no passage reflects on how much different the sanctuary must have appeared during the time of Zedekiah (597–586 BCE) in contrast to the period of Solomon’s reign (ca. 950 BCE) from nearly four centuries before. The careful reader will be hard pressed to notice any differences between the portrayal of David’s Jerusalem in the Book of Samuel from Josiah or Jehoiakim’s capital depicted in the Book of Kings or the Book of Jeremiah, though the former city had roughly one-tenth the population that occupied an inhabited area not half the size of the latter.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Tenth century BCE Jerusalem was a much different place than its seventh or fifth century BCE successors, in other words, but no biblical text considers what these differences would have meant for how life was experienced within the highland city over the generations.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

What is key to Koselleck’s theory of the temporalization of history, then, is a sensitivity to anachronism that emerged in tandem with it. By anachronism, I mean an awareness of time being “out of joint,” as Annette Barnes and Jonathan Barnes describe it, such as when “a clock strikes in Julius Caesar” or when the Virgin and Child “receive devotions from fifteenth century Venetians” in a painting that adorns a cathedral wall.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ To draw on Zachary Schiffman’s definition in his study of this phenomenon, our sense of anachronism derives from the realization that “the past is not simply prior to the present but different from it,”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ with our predecessors living in a world disparate from what we experience today.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ This awareness drives our historical desire to situate phenomena from the past into their specific historical contexts and to identify those moments – Moses commenting on Twitter, Esther responding to Mordechai by quoting Sartre – when something has been misplaced, dislodged from its proper historical period and situated elsewhere in a time that it does not belong in. Our pronounced sensitivity to anachronism – the great “sin against the holy spirit of history”Footnote ¹⁹¹ – is “second nature” to us, Schiffman writes – an outcome of a presupposition we hold about how the past is utterly distinct from the present. But as Schiffman’s book-length study makes clear, this presupposition has a history, ours being the product of a much more recent mindset.Footnote ¹⁹²

This argument, however, requires some nuance.Footnote ¹⁹³ In the Hebrew Bible there are, in fact, a number of passages where older customs or terminology is recognized as outmoded or even obsolete. In 1 Sam 9:9 the narrator remarks in an aside that “formerly in Israel, anyone who went to inquire of God would say, ‘Come, let us go to the seer,’ for the one who is now called a prophet was once called a seer.” A similar comment appears in Ruth 4:7 (“now in former times this is how redeeming and exchanging happened”) and in 2 Kings 17:34, 40 (“to this day they continue to practice their former traditions”). In addition, various biblical texts comment on how certain locations had been renamed in the past, such as Hebron (“Now the name of Hebron formerly was Kiriath-arba” [Josh 14:15; Judges 1:10]) or Debir (“the name of Debir was formerly Kiriath-sepher” [Judges 1:11]). Older texts not found in the biblical writings are also alluded to in a number of passages (e.g., Num 21:14–15; Josh 10:13), perhaps detailing a past that was distinct from the biblical writers’ present, particularly given the possibility that some of these documents were older royal annals that recorded information from generations before.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

The biblical writers were aware, then, of certain practices that belonged to a bygone world. Yet, as with the ancient Greek writers Schiffman examines, the appearance of these references in the Hebrew Bible are quite isolated and never lead to a more concentrated reflection on what these older ways of life might indicate for the relationship between the past recounted in biblical storytelling and the biblical authors’ present.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Instead, Schiffman observes, texts from antiquity note incidents of anachronism “only in passing, for specific rhetorical purposes, after which the ancient authors set them aside, effectively relegating them to oblivion.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ It is not, then, that the biblical writers were unaware of anachronisms. It is that they did not find them meaningful.

It is perhaps for similar reasons that other examples of anachronism receive such little attention within these writings. It is rather unsettling from our historical perspective, for example, to read of Philistine populations appearing on the coastal plain (Gen 21:32, 26:1) half a millennium before we know, archaeologically speaking, they had settled in the southern Levant,Footnote ¹⁹⁷ or to find Abraham saddling his camels (Gen 24:10) centuries prior to when they were domesticated in the region.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ In Deuteronomy the narrator refers to an Israelite conquest that had already been completed before it began (Deut 2:12), and certain “cities of Samaria” (1 Kings 13:32) are referred to in the time of Jeroboam I, decades before Samaria is said to have been built as the royal center of the Omrides (1 Kings 16:24). In Samuel, Israelites make payments to Philistines in a weight system that would not exist until hundreds of years after the time period in which the story is set (1 Sam 13:21),Footnote ¹⁹⁹ and later David walks into a Jerusalem temple that had not yet been built (2 Sam 12:20). In the Book of Chronicles, David receives money for the sanctuary in a coinage introduced by the Persian Empire five hundred years after he died (1 Chr 29:7),Footnote ²⁰⁰ and Asaph sings a hymn on behalf of exilic populations (1 Chr 16:35) when the exile was still four hundred years in the future. Later in the book, temple personnel and liturgical practices are carefully ordered by David (1 Chr 23–27) in ways that reflect practices of the Second Temple and not those of the early Iron Age cult that would have been more familiar to those living half a millennium before. And to these instances can be added our study of ruins that appeared over the course of nearly two thousand years but are portrayed largely as the outcome of one era in the biblical corpus, without comment on the differences that would have marked their appearance and forms to those who encountered them.

This rather indifferent attitude toward anachronism matters because it provides further insight into why the biblical writers make no mention of digging among the ruins they describe. If past and present were experienced as deeply connected by those behind the Hebrew Bible, if ways of life were thought to exhibit some coherence across the generations, then the impulse to excavate ruins and index what was distinctive about conditions in previous times would have been muted. Old debris strewn beneath the ground and the present buildings above it could be viewed as predominantly complementary, as materials of a world, past and present, that held much in common. If we think otherwise, it is because we are bound to a particular impression of time, whereby “expectations have distanced themselves evermore from all previous experience,”Footnote ²⁰¹ as Koselleck describes it. This sense of the past as distant and alien has been reinforced by two centuries of archaeological excavations that have demonstrated, in a decisive manner, the discontinuities that separate one period from the next.

If we return to the ancient site of Sippar and examine once more Nabonidus’ attempt to excavate the great Ebabbar temple with his team of workers, a similar set of questions can be posed. Schaudig had already pointed the way forward, as noted in the opening to this chapter, by remarking that Nabonidus’ efforts at excavation were not driven by an interest in learning about the past as such but by a desire to demonstrate continuity between more ancient rulers and his present, granting him legitimacy at a moment when it may have been in question. Nabonidus’ “worldview,” Schaudig argues, was fundamentally “unhistorical,” with the connection between past and present being maintained in a manner that was “anachronistic.”Footnote ²⁰² This was a worldview that sought cohesion across time and space in spite of the substantial changes that had transpired in the two millennia that separated the reign of Sargon the Great from Nabonidus’ own. The past was once experienced as unbroken and repeatable, Koselleck argues in this vein, functioning as the magistra vitae that offered lessons to be imitated in the present, a past that was to be returned to and emulated whenever possible.Footnote ²⁰³ From this perspective, Nabonidus did not dig in order to discover foreign cultic practices and ancient beliefs that separated the Old Akkadian period from his own Neo-Babylonian context. He wanted to demonstrate that his rule was akin to those of the great rulers of old, consistent with their practices and ways of life.

Though there is no mention of it in their writings, it cannot be discounted, then, that contemporaries to the biblical writers or the biblical writers themselves sifted among the ruins that surrounded them. It is apparent that individuals in the first millennium BCE could reuse older materials found at ruined sites (spolia).Footnote ²⁰⁴ The famous Tel Dan inscription, for example, was found in three pieces,Footnote ²⁰⁵ each fragment located in secondary construction contexts. The builders who reused these stones were apparently “unaware” that the pieces were “part of a broken stele erected by an Aramean king,” the excavators write,Footnote ²⁰⁶ or, at the very least, they had little interest in the historical significance such fragments held. After Jerusalem’s fall, archaeological evidence suggests that squatters lived among the ruins of the capital in the decades after and reused materials from destroyed buildingsFootnote ²⁰⁷ – a phenomenon also witnessed elsewhere in the region after various calamities.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Items of value could also be buried and returned to, such as the silver hoards found at Ekron or Eshtemoa.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Perhaps, like Nabonidus, relics from the past were similarly sought at certain locations, even if for destruction, as when Josiah is said to have demolished the old altar at Bethel and those cultic items connected to it (2 Kings 23:15), including certain graves in Bethel’s vicinity.

But such practices are not what archaeologists undertake today. Beyond the retrieval or reuse of specific items of value found buried in the ground, the aims of contemporary excavations are now more encompassing and systematic, given over to exposing broad swaths of a settlement so as to better understand the lives of those who inhabited it across centuries and even millennia.Footnote ²¹⁰ “The archaeologist’s use of his [sic] stratified relics depends on his conceiving them as artifacts serving human purposes,” R. G. Collingwood writes, “and thus expressing a particular way in which men [sic] have thought about life.”Footnote ²¹¹ But this interest in a “particular way” of conceiving the world is dependent on a fundamental assumption, one that presumes historical particularity and a belief that how we understand ourselves and our environment is contingent on the places and periods in which specific human purposes are carried out. To us, ruins are evidence of these particularities and contingencies, illustrating the divisions in technology, taste, and lifeways that separate one era from the next. But nowhere in the biblical writings are ruins described as such.

The question is when this sense of ruins transforms. In Section 1.3.2, we turn to a period that Koselleck terms the Sattelzeit. In this era, stemming from roughly 1750 CE–1850 CE, Koselleck contends that overarching impressions of time, drawn out from the writings of leading figures of this era, begin to be described differently, including the identification of the present as a “new time” (neue Zeit) that is severed from all that came before. For our purposes, what matters about this era is that it coincides with novel understandings of ruins that also emerge.

1.3.2 Ruins Now

On January 11, 1804, François René de Chateaubriand visited the ruins of Pompeii.Footnote ²¹² In a journal he would later publish as Travels in America and Italy,Footnote ²¹³ Chateaubriand describes the excavations being carried out at the site, now already in their fifth decade by the time of that warm January day. It is within these journal entries that Chateaubriand records what areas of Pompeii had been uncovered and what structures unearthed, providing us with a snapshot of how the location appeared at this time. But what makes Chateaubriand’s journal of special interest are his reflections on the techniques used by the laborers to dig up the site’s remains. Of these efforts, Chateaubriand writes that the men “remove whatever they discover” in the buildings they clear, from simple household utensils to the more elaborate furniture and statuary they have retrieved within the settlement’s ancient enclosures.Footnote ²¹⁴

Though such practices were commonplace at the time,Footnote ²¹⁵ Chateaubriand is nevertheless troubled by what he witnesses. “What is present done seems to me lamentable” he remarks, a sentiment precipitated, it appears, by how Pompeii’s artifacts were “promiscuously carried” off to the royal palace at Portici to be stored away for its benefactors to possess, “buried in cabinets where they are no longer in keeping with surrounding objects.”Footnote ²¹⁶ Rather than extracting antiquities from the site and sending them away, Chateaubriand writes that these items should be “preserved on the spot,” the structures’ roofs and ceilings, floors and windows, “being carefully restored” in an effort to safeguard these remains.Footnote ²¹⁷ The result of such practices would be to preserve a Roman city in its entirety, offering insights into “the domestic history of the Roman people” that would surpass in its details “all the books of antiquity.”Footnote ²¹⁸ Yet, unable to prevent the workers from their pilfering, Chateaubriand stands removed, voicing a final question for an audience whose time had not yet come: “Why not have left these things as they found them, and where they found them?”Footnote ²¹⁹

24 Temple of Isis at Pompeii. Francesco Piranesi, 1788.

Creative Commons (CC0 1.0). Cleveland Museum of Art

Chateaubriand’s writings have received considerable scholarly attention because of the turning point they represent,Footnote ²²⁰ exhibiting “a rather more complex relationship to the past than had been seen before,”Footnote ²²¹ as Peter Fritzsche remarks in his study of this era. Much of what makes Chateaubriand’s discussion of ruins peculiar for their time is their sensitivity to what we would now describe as these remains’ archaeological context, or the desire to understand artifacts in situ, interpreted historically within the broader, undisturbed framework in which certain objects are found. What matters about Pompeii’s ruins, from this vantage point, is the historical information they convey. Rather than seeing items of high worth wrested from excavations to be sold to wealthy benefactors or clients, as was the dominant practice at the time, Chateaubriand expresses the desire to study Pompeii’s ruins in order to learn about the more mundane details of how the ancient inhabitants of the city once lived. Such insights, as Chateaubriand describes them, are necessary for understanding the “domestic history” of the Roman population that had perished at Pompeii, a history that required the city’s material remains to be left in place so that they could be examined where they were found.

Though nothing had changed about Pompeii’s ruins in the decades since their discovery, Chateaubriand suddenly sees them differently than did those who came before.Footnote ²²² Why he does so is connected to the broader historical circumstances in which Chateaubriand was embroiled, above all the French Revolution and the transformations to French society that Chateaubriand and his royalist allies had attempted to halt.Footnote ²²³ Fritzsche writes,Footnote ²²⁴

Witnesses to a movement that sought a sundering with France’s past, Chateaubriand and his contemporaries began to consider ruins from perspectives that had not been regarded before. In part, Fritzsche argues, this new lens for contemplating material remains was occasioned by how ruins were affected by the French Revolution. The National Convention’s decision to destroy old castles, estates, and churches left an indelible impression on those who sought to safeguard France’s past, a practice that perhaps reached its height when the royal tombs at Saint-Denis were exhumed so that the cadavers could be desecrated and dumped in a common trench.Footnote ²²⁵ The attempt to erase the past, in other words, suddenly brought it sharply into relief for those such as Chateaubriand, giving rise to a new “historical field” and novel “structures of temporality” that enabled individuals to look at older remains in ways no one had looked at them before.

To these ruins of revolution would be added those that arose in the wake of Napoleon’s advances in Europe soon thereafter, where territories outside of France also experienced ruination at a scale not before encountered. The manufacture of artificial ruins such as the Magdalenenklause, so common on royal estates in the early decades of the eighteenth century CE, now gives way to a new sensibility a century later. What emerges in the nineteenth century is an interest in the historical provenance of ruins and their preservation, the material remains of locations valued for their connections to a national heritage and their capacity to shed light on how forebears once lived at a particular site or within a territory, as Chateaubriand’s journal intimates. Ruins become dense with history in this period, their materials seen as traces of singular and unrepeatable past events that offered “evidence of counter lives”Footnote ²²⁶ who occupied ages other than one’s own. Ruins can no longer be faked and found meaningful. They need to be excavated, studied, and conserved. It is only now, in the nineteenth century, that widespread efforts at the preservation of ruins takes hold.Footnote ²²⁷ Work on the Cologne Cathedral, abandoned to ruin in 1473 CE, is suddenly resumed in 1842 CE.Footnote ²²⁸

Why Chateaubriand and those who followed began to look at ruins differently is a phenomenon that is certainly more complex than what one catalyst can explain, however momentous. To political revolution can be added rapid industrialization and the maturation of capitalist market economies, intensive practices of colonialism by European powers, and the rise of technologies that would forever alter lived experience (e.g., synchronized clocks, international railway systems, the telegraph). But more important for our study than the reasons for this change in perspective is the perspective itself that took hold. An interest in ruins, Fritzsche observes, was now “marked by a new historical sensibility that scrutinized differences” among the remains encountered, galvanized by a “concern with context and curiosity about ‘how people lived.’”Footnote ²²⁹

Chateaubriand’s long life spanned nearly the entirety of Koselleck’s Sattelzeit, from his birth in 1768 to his death in Paris in 1848. For those from this era, Koselleck argues, a displacement or rupture in the sense of time became a central part of their experience.Footnote ²³⁰ In the writings of Immanuel Kant, one reads of a new conception of “progress” (Fortschritt) by which the future is increasingly distanced from past practices and ideas; for de Lamartine, the “rapidity of time” (La rapidité du temps) contributed to the sense that “there is no more contemporary history,” his present era made immediately obsolete due to the dramatic social and political changes that were occurring in such quick succession.Footnote ²³¹ In this period, German writers begin to speak of a “new time” (neue Zeit), characterized as more than one of simple succession but qualitatively novel, a time never experienced before, and, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century CE, the composite expression Neuzeit is used widely as the term that signifies the modern period in its entirety.Footnote ²³²

There was something about this era that was “new” to those who lived during it, in other words, and what was novel was the experience of time itself. Koselleck, for his part, describes this moment as the “dawning of a new temporality.”Footnote ²³³ In his reading of accounts from this era, Koselleck writes,Footnote ²³⁴

Born into a world whose future was increasingly unknown and whose past was becoming increasingly unrecognizable, new perspectives on ruins arose in tandem with lived experience coming undone and being recast afresh.Footnote ²³⁵ With time experienced as accelerating at ever greater speed, leaving a long series of obsolete cultural and political formations in its wake, a sensitivity toward historical differences emerges that elicited novel understandings of ruins and the archaeological record. Our desire “to investigate those past lives through the medium of material remains,” Julian Thomas observes in his study of the rise of archaeological practices, “is itself distinctively modern.”Footnote ²³⁶ If we were not descendants of this particular period and its experiences, “it might not occur to us to do archaeology at all.”Footnote ²³⁷

For Koselleck, it is in this period that a sense of the temporalization of history begins to solidify, and with it a more acute sensitivity to anachronism and historical sequencing. Even the very terminology for history transforms during this time, Koselleck observes, from a concept that posits a plurality of past experiences specific and unique to various territories, to history as a collective singular, a notion of “history itself” (die Geschichte selber) that is universal and global, encompassing all events within a shared human past.Footnote ²³⁸ “This is the master category, the condition under which the time of history can be thought,” Ricoeur remarks in his reading of Koselleck. “There is a time of history insofar as there is one single history.”Footnote ²³⁹ The idea of history we hold today, and our experience of its specific temporality, is born in this moment.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that toward the end of the Sattelzeit period the ruins of the southern Levant come to be explored in ways never witnessed before.Footnote ²⁴⁰ In 1838 CE, we find Edward Robinson and Eli Smith setting out for Palestine to document the region and investigate sites of ruin that may represent locations named in the Bible, driven by a curiosity to recover an ancient landscape they believed had been lost.Footnote ²⁴¹ In the words of Robinson, their efforts wereFootnote ²⁴²

The sense of novelty underscored by Koselleck in his theory of temporalization is, in this passage, readily apparent. Standing on the threshold of “scientific exploration,” Thomas Davis comments in his study of these travelers, but still of a mindset beholden to “the days of pilgrimage” from centuries before,Footnote ²⁴³ these liminal figures provide the first historical geography of eras associated with the Bible, identifying a number of locations that, in time, would come to be excavated. Robinson and Smith’s remarkable achievements were however hampered by their inability to understand what the terrain could at moments indicate. Encountering strange hills without visible ruins on their surface, Robinson and Smith bypassed a number of these mounds because they failed to fathom a defining feature of the landscape that the biblical writers had recognized millennia in the past: namely, that certain hills were artificial, the creation of successive cities built and destroyed.Footnote ²⁴⁴

When this insight was recovered is debated. Some link it to the excavations carried out at Hissarlik by Heinrich Schliemann in the early 1870s, where various strata were exposed and differentiated in order to locate the specific layer that represented Homer’s Troy.Footnote ²⁴⁵ But in Palestine, a clear recognition of how ruin mounds preserve the layered remains of distinct settlements is found in the writings of Sir Flanders Petrie. In 1890, after a number of seasons of excavation in Egypt, Petrie arrived at the site of Tel el-Hesi, 25km east of Gaza.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Drawing near the site after a heavy rain had washed away an edge of the mound, Petrie observes striations that have become visible. In this moment, Petrie comes to the realization of something that will be essential to all archaeological efforts in the region that follow, writing that the “mound, for over 60 feet of its height, consists of successive ruins of towns piled one on the other.”Footnote ²⁴⁷ A sensitivity to historical difference is now applied to the material remains of the southern Levant through the idea of archaeological strata, forever altering how excavations will be carried out in the region.

The early efforts of Robinson, Smith, and Petrie give rise to an ever-increasing number of digs in the early decades of the twentieth century CE. Alongside Petrie’s observations on stratigraphy will be added W. F. Albright’s refined analyses of ceramic typology,Footnote ²⁴⁸ and, in time, the Wheeler-Kenyon method of excavation that still prevails today.Footnote ²⁴⁹ But with these advancements in archaeological method will come the realization that what had been unearthed could depart from how the biblical writers once described these same ruins in antiquity, a point drawn out at a number of moments in our discussion of Bronze and Iron Age settlements (Sections 1.1.2 and 1.1.3). So it is that we come once more to the site of ’Ai (et-Tell) in the 1960s and find Joseph Callaway struggling to understand the historical implications of what the location’s archaeological evidence suggested. Rather than a great city conquered and destroyed in the waning moments of the LBA by the Israelites, as the Book of Joshua suggests, the archaeological evidence from ’Ai indicates instead that its downfall took place a thousand years before in the EBA period. “’Ai is simply an embarrassment,” Callaway writes in an unguarded moment of reflection, to those who take “the biblical and archaeological evidence seriously.”Footnote ²⁵⁰ Ruins then, ruins now.

§

The ruins have not changed, but how we look at them has.Footnote ²⁵¹ This shift in perception is most apparent in our inclination today to excavate the remains of ancient settlements in order to learn about the lives of those who once inhabited them – an act and interest not found in any of the many references to ruins located in the Hebrew Bible. The divide around which this chapter is organized centers on this discrepancy, and how to account for it.

What our survey of Bronze and Iron Age settlements demonstrated is that the biblical writers inhabited a world in which ruins were visible throughout the landscapes familiar to them. It does not matter where these scribes were located nor, for that matter, the specific time period in which they were active. From Hazor in the north to Arad in the south, from the city of Jericho in the Jordan Valley to sites scattered along the coastal plain, those living in the southern Levant in the first millennium BCE occupied a terrain in which the remains of numerous Bronze and Iron Age sites were in view. Even at locations that had not been destroyed, more venerable ruins, centuries old, would have often featured as part of the urban landscape, such as at Hebron, Jerusalem, and Megiddo, among other settlements. If the biblical writings express little interest in what lay buried, it is not because material remains of past populations were unknown to them.

Rather, what is striking about these biblical accounts is their consistent recognition of ruins and their antiquity. Frequently, ruins are depicted as the outcome of wanton acts of destruction that took place in the past or simply as remains left behind from former events or practices, wearing away as time progresses. Whether in the fallen fortifications of a settlement or buildings long abandoned, the ruins the biblical writers depict are frequently the items that archaeologists, today, unearth.

These points of continuity dissipate, however, when turning to matters of time. What separates our experience of ruins from those behind the biblical writings, I have argued, is how we locate material remains within the sweep of history. To us, it is the variations of material forms preserved in the archaeological record that provide the possibility of situating their remains within distinct eras, the forward flow of time giving rise to new developments that can be distinguished from what came before. Changes in architectural style and ceramic assemblages, foodways and ritual practices, among other instances, allow us to peg these remains within certain periods in the Bronze or Iron Age, and at moments even in specific centuries.

The biblical writings, however, conceive of the temporality of ruins differently. Like Altdorfer’s portrait, the biblical writings are less sensitive to the discontinuities that mark the passing of time, where the world in which David acquired Jerusalem is not too distant from the ones Jeremiah or Ezekiel knew many centuries later. In the Hebrew Bible, the material remains that arose in the past are principally attached to one age, an age whose ways of life are mostly consistent with the biblical writers’ own. The time that ruins convey to these scribes is something other than our sense of the depth of history and the developments that have taken place across the millennia. To us, the MBA is a decisive moment in the history of the southern Levant, leaving behind monumental ruins that are some of the most impressive remains from antiquity. The collapse of this society then gives way to centuries of Egyptian hegemony and the construction of Egyptian outposts at Jaffa and Beth-Shean, among other instances of Egyptian involvement. But of the great cities of the MBA or Egyptian control of the region during the LBA, much less the eras that came before, the biblical writings show little awareness or interest.

At work in a world in which past experiences and present ones were believed to have much in common, the inclination to scour ruins for the differences that marked out the lives of forebears was, I contend, less pronounced for the biblical writers. Yet for us this impulse is a guiding presupposition, our sense of the past marked above all by an awareness of discontinuity, of time fractured into distinct periods by changes in technology, taste, politics, and commerce. Ruins are evidence of the developments that have taken hold over the course of time, the EBA II ruins of ca. 2500 BCE being distinct from MBA and LBA settlements that arose hundreds of years after them, let alone from the still later Iron Age, Persian, or Hellenistic communities that would emerge. But this way of looking at ruins is quite recent. The point is straightforward but no less meaningful: The discipline of archaeology is born late, the product of a rupture in the experience of time.

For Ricoeur, this experience speaks to our “historical condition.” By condition, Ricoeur writes of a twofold meaning: the first, that of being situated, implicated, enclosed; the second, that of something that makes possible a way of being in the world. In contrast to those who came before, “[w]e make history, and we make histories,” Ricoeur writes, “because we are historical.”Footnote ²⁵² The claim is not triumphant. Ricoeur will write of the “burden” of history and later of the “devastating effect” that the “historicization of all human experience” occasions, drawing near to the arguments of Friedrich Nietzsche from a century before.Footnote ²⁵³ Nevertheless, this condition is ours, something that is “insurmountable,” Ricoeur writes, unable, as we are, to think otherwise or beyond it.Footnote ²⁵⁴ Our “ambivalence” to this mode of temporality, Koselleck writes in a similar vein, is an experience we cannot outpace.Footnote ²⁵⁵

25 Catharine Wolfe expedition to Sippar (Tell Abu Habba). John Henry Haynes, photograph, 1884.

Sterrett Collection of Archaeological Photographs. Photographs of Asia Minor, #4776. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Public domain

But if our understanding of ruins is inescapably historical and our practices of excavation recent, the question that emerges is how ruins were experienced otherwise by those behind the biblical writings. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, we take up this question.