A history of biblical archaeology

In 1867 a survey party waded past the Siloam inscription without seeing it. Since then Mesha’s stone, the Tel Dan stele and the letters from Lachish have come to light, and the market has offered a good deal else. This page starts from the one date an eclipse can fix and climbs the Bible’s own numbers from there, asking of each find what it can carry.

A history in 17 parts · about 1 hr 10 min · c. 1850 – today

The decades around 700 BC · Fixed by what?

Cabbage Stalks

The spring under Jerusalem rises without warning, and in December 1867 Charles Warren believed he had allowed for it. Warren was a young officer of the Royal Engineers, digging the city for the Palestine Exploration Fund, and he wanted a survey of the channel that runs through the hill from the Gihon spring to the pool of Siloam. The water had risen two hours earlier, so nobody expected it again that day. He went in at the Siloam end with Sergeant Birtles, a village laborer, a tape, a compass and candles, “so as to have as much clean work as possible.” The roof stood 16 feet high at the mouth and came down fast. At 600 feet they were crawling on a crust of silt in four inches of water, wet no higher than the hips, and Warren thought they were getting on pleasantly. “Presently bits of cabbage-stalks came floating by, and we suddenly awoke to the fact that the waters were rising.” The village of Silwan used the spring as a scullery.

At 850 feet they lay full length in a stream that reached their necks. Fifty feet on, the roof stood 16 inches above the silt and the water left four inches of air. Warren held the candle in his mouth for most of the way, twisted his neck to breathe and took his compass readings with his mouth under water, and here he swallowed part of his pencil. He made fifty-seven compass stations over 1,708 feet, came out at the spring after dark, and stood shivering until someone brought his clothes. They had been nearly four hours in the water. In the first minute, while they could still walk upright, they had passed a smoothed panel on the right-hand wall, nineteen feet in from the mouth and mostly under water. Nobody in the party saw it.

A boy found it by falling. In June 1880 one of the pupils of Conrad Schick, a German architect long settled in Jerusalem, was climbing down at the south end when he stumbled on the broken rock and went in, and as he came up he saw marks like letters on the wall. A second report has two youths trying to wade through to the far end. None of the early accounts gives a name. Claude Conder, the Fund’s surveyor, looked at where the panel lay and wrote that “the marvel appears to me to be that it was ever found at all.”

There were six lines, in the old Hebrew letters, and they describe the end of a job. Two gangs had been cutting toward each other through the hill. In the English that G. A. Cooke, the Oxford editor of the Semitic inscriptions, printed in 1903, with his brackets around what he had to restore, “whilst yet there were three cubits to be bored [through, there was hear]d the voice of each calling to his fellow.” On the day they broke through, “the miners struck, each to meet his fellow, pick upon pick; and the waters flowed from the source to the pool.”

The text names no king and no god, which Gary Rendsburg and William Schniedewind, in a modern study of its language, call unparalleled among royal building inscriptions, and it gives no year. It fills only the lower half of the panel. Above it the rock is dressed, Cooke thought, “as though it had been prepared for some more writing,” and bare but for a name some later visitor scratched there. Near the tunnel’s entrance, by the report of Ronny Reich, who excavated the spring, a second place was prepared, and nothing was written on it.

The name everyone supplies is Hezekiah’s, because 2 Kings 20:20 says that he “made the pool, and the conduit, and brought water into the city.” Nobody has read that name off the stone, because it is not there. When Cooke wrote that there could be “little doubt” the work belonged to that reign, he was reasoning from Kings and Chronicles and from the walls of the city.

The first reader had another king in mind. A. H. Sayce, the Oxford Assyriologist, gave the letters to “the age of Solomon” and called the evidence of the script “wholly against” anything as late as Hezekiah. Isaac Taylor, an English writer on the alphabet, answered him from Sayce’s own table of letters with the reign of Ahaz. What Sayce had been reading was a surface still caked with lime, which Conder called “a rude scrawl of uncertain shapes.” Then a German scholar, Hermann Guthe, washed it with acid. Sayce said the acid had eaten letters he had seen, Conder said those letters had been lime marks all along, and once the text stood clean Sayce gave up Solomon. He had missed by more than two centuries.

The length was argued too. Sayce read a thousand cubits. M. W. Shapira, a Jerusalem dealer in antiquities, read twelve hundred, and Conder set down “the two readings adopted by Professor Sayce and Mr. Shapira respectively.” Twelve hundred is what the editions print. Sayce warned that a thousand “is a round number, and should not be pressed too closely,” and Cooke said of twelve hundred that it was “of no value for fixing the length of the cubit,” two warnings that have not stopped anyone from working out the cubit from it.

By October 1890 someone had cut the panel out of the rock, breaking it in the process. The acting British consul reported what followed, claiming credit as he did so. A missionary and a doctor called at the house of George Patrides, a Greek Ottoman subject, to see a “Moabite stone.” Patrides was out, and “his wife by inadvertence showed them the Siloam one.” He said he had paid thirty-five gold napoleons for it to a villager whose name he could not remember. The governor took it for Constantinople. Within months of the theft the Fund’s journal was noting “Another ‘Siloam inscription,’” which it called “a clumsy forgery in seven lines of Phoenician characters.”

Israel has asked for the panel several times. In March 2022 Turkish diplomatic sources answered that its find spot, Ottoman when it was found, now lay in “Palestinian territories,” so that handing it to Israel was out of the question. The tunnel runs under Silwan, in East Jerusalem, which is contested on any reading. In 2017 an Israeli minister is reported to have offered two elephants for it, perhaps in jest. It is in Istanbul still.

15 June 763 BC · Fixed by the sun

In the Month of Sivan

One line on a clay list of Assyrian officials names Bur-Sagale of the city of Guzana and goes on, in the English of the American scholar R. W. Rogers, 1912: “A revolt in the city of Asshur. In the month of Sivan an eclipse of the sun took place.” The Assyrians named each year after an official, and their scribes kept the names in order, so the list is a calendar with a man in place of each number. The clay gives the man, the revolt, the month and the eclipse. It does not give the year, which no Assyrian would have called 763, or the day. Those are Victorian arithmetic. J. R. Hind calculated the eclipse, George Airy, the Astronomer Royal, set it out in a table, and George Smith of the British Museum, who had trained as an engraver, printed the result in 1875: 15 June 763 BC.

Fixed by what? A reader can put that question to any date in any Bible handbook, and the answer here is the sun. The eclipse alone dates nothing. Its use is that it pins one line, and the list then carries the years up and down from that line, one official at a time. Ninety years up the list, which runs back in time, stands an official named Dayyan-Ashur, so his year is 853. In the spring of that year Shalmaneser III of Assyria set out on the march recorded on his stone from Kurkh, on the upper Tigris. It lists the kings who met him at Qarqar in Syria, and among them “two thousand chariots, ten thousand men of Ahab, the Israelite.” It claims twelve kings and names eleven, and the two thousand is a figure many doubt. Scripture does not mention the battle. Older books print 854 for the same year.

So in 853 a king of Israel touches a calendar kept by someone else. Earlier than that year the dates of Israel’s history are the Bible’s own numbers, and this page climbs them as far as they go and then comes back down.

Jehu touched the calendar next. Austen Henry Layard, digging the Assyrian mound of Nimrud, had run a trench over fifty feet with nothing to show for it and had left for Mosul. “I mounted my horse; but had scarcely left the mound when a corner of black marble was uncovered, lying on the very edge of the trench.” It was what is now called the Black Obelisk, seven feet high, lying on its side ten feet down, with twenty small reliefs and 210 lines of writing. Layard saw “a prisoner” at the feet of a king and guessed a conquest of India. The caption over that scene, when it could be read, turned out to be “Tribute of Jehu, of the land of Omri.” The caption names Jehu’s payment. Whether the man on the ground is Jehu himself the stone does not say. Behind “of the land” stands the Assyrian word for son, which is how Shalmaneser’s scribes name a state by its founder, so the old translation “son of Omri” says nothing about a man who had put an end to Omri’s house. The year, 841, comes from Shalmaneser’s annals, which record the payment too, and owes nothing to the picture.

These anchors did not arrive as friends. In 1862 Henry Rawlinson, the decipherer who had found the list, published his notes in the Athenaeum and held that Jehu’s accession would have to come down about forty years against the received dates, the chronology of Ussher that stood in the margins of English Bibles. Smith believed the Bible’s numbers from Solomon onward “in the main correct,” and in 1875 he saved them in the only way he could see, by giving up the names: “If we allow that the Ahab and Jehu mentioned in the Assyrian records may not be the Ahab and Jehu of the Bible, we are not under the necessity of altering the chronology.” Julius Oppert, the French Assyriologist, tried it another way. He held that the list had lost forty-seven years and that its eclipse was one of 809. The quarrel was public, and the eclipse of 763 won it. The list and the names stood, and the old margin dates went. What the Bible’s chronology rests on today came into the field as an attack on it.

The record behind all this is thinner than the confidence of the handbooks suggests. A slab of Tiglath-pileser III names Pekah and Hoshea, and 2 Kings 15:30 says that Hoshea killed Pekah. The slab was left in the mound at Nimrud. Smith copied it from paper impressions in the British Museum, and the impressions have since been lost, so everyone who reads that text is reading Smith’s hand. Both names are there. The verb between them cannot be read, so nobody knows whether Assyria claims the killing. The silver that follows comes to 2,000 talents in one of Smith’s copies, 200 in his draft and 1,000 in his printed text.

The dates a Bible reader can lean on in this way are few: the eclipse in 763, Qarqar in 853, Jehu’s payment in 841, Sennacherib in Judah in 701, the fall of Nineveh in 612, the capture of Jerusalem in 597, and the fall of Babylon in 539. Samaria, about 722, nearly belongs among them, though who took it is argued. Even Nineveh’s date is recent. Until C. J. Gadd published a chronicle in 1923 the books said 606, and a popular history printed before then is usually six years out.

Later finds have backed the list above the eclipse, and hardly anyone now doubts it at 853. Smith himself thought the names above that line agreed with the annals of those kings, and still he drew the line: “Above the date B.C. 763 there is no positive proof of any Assyrian canon date.”

701 BC · Fixed by Sennacherib’s annals and the list of officials

Like a Bird in a Cage

The list of officials runs down as well as up, and below Ahab it reaches 701, the year of the campaign the tunnel has always been tied to. Room XXXVI of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh measured 38 feet by 18, and its walls carried thirteen slabs cracked by the fire that ended the building. They show a walled town under assault and its people led out past a seated king. Layard, clearing the room, found a label beside the king, and in his book of 1853 he had the king say “I give permission for its slaughter.” The label says nothing of the kind. It says, in D. D. Luckenbill’s English of 1924, that “the booty of Lachish passed before him.” Rawlinson at first denied that this was the Lachish of Scripture.

Sennacherib’s annals tell the campaign from further off. The first report was written within a year and copied for twelve. It counts forty-six walled towns taken in Judah, a figure that appears as thirty-six and fifty-six in other copies of the same edition, names none of them, and claims 200,150 people. It never mentions Lachish, and nothing in the room shows Jerusalem, so the king’s best-known monument and his own record do not overlap. The annals know one campaign. Some have argued for a second, because 2 Kings 19:9 calls Tirhakah king of Ethiopia, which he may not yet have been, and others take the title for hindsight.

At Jerusalem the claim shrinks. He claims ramps and breaches for the towns. Against the city he claims only a ring of posts and a gate that no one could safely leave, and he shut up Hezekiah, in Rogers’s English, “like a caged bird within Jerusalem, his royal city.” Isaiah 37:33 reads: “He will not come to this city, nor shoot an arrow there, neither will he come before it with shield, nor cast up a mound against it.” The cage is a stock phrase. A king of Byblos had used it of himself in letters to Pharaoh, and Tiglath-pileser III had used it of Rezin of Damascus before Damascus was taken, so that it looks like what a scribe wrote of a king still behind his wall.

In the annals the money came later, after the army had gone, carried to Nineveh by Hezekiah’s own messenger; in Kings it goes to the king at Lachish. Both have thirty talents of gold. The annals have eight hundred of silver and 2 Kings 18:14 three hundred, and the modern editors note the gap and solve nothing. Why the army went, the annals do not say. Isaiah 37:36 says that “Yahweh’s angel went out and struck one hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the camp of the Assyrians.” Herodotus heard an Egyptian temple story, set on Egypt’s border, in which field mice “ate up their quivers and their bows,” and whether it remembers the same retreat nobody can show. Twenty years on, a Babylonian chronicle has Sennacherib “killed by his son in a revolt,” and there a hostile record lands on the last verse of that chapter, where his sons strike him with the sword.

Finding Lachish itself took nearly eighty years and a false start. In April 1890 Flinders Petrie, the English Egyptologist, spent six weeks at Tell el-Hesy, working only the side that a torrent had cut, and reading the mound’s history off it from top to bottom. He taught the trade what it was looking at. “We have our tells,” he said, “only we still live on the top of them,” and the tell he had in mind was London, where any deep digging in the City went down through twenty or thirty feet of plates, brickbats and Roman tile. A level, in the language he left behind, is one town’s worth of rubble lying on the last. He published the book as Tell el Hesy (Lachish), and it was not Lachish.

J. L. Starkey, who had trained under Petrie, dug the true mound, Tell ed-Duweir, from 1932. He found a burned level full of Judean pots and tied it to the capture of Jerusalem in 597. Olga Tufnell, who finished his publication, moved it to 701 in 1953, against W. F. Albright, the leading authority of the age, and many stayed with Albright for a generation. Every comparable group of Judean pottery moved a hundred and four years with it. A burned layer carries no date of its own until someone ties it to an event, and for decades this one was tied to the wrong event. The dig of David Ussishkin of Tel Aviv, which began in 1973, settled it, helped by a visitor that first year who looked at the heaps of stone at the southwest corner, which Starkey had taken for fallen masonry, and said they were a siege ramp. They were. Ussishkin found a counter-ramp behind the wall and over 800 arrowheads, and jars with the royal stamp were in use at Lachish when it fell in 701.

That leaves the hole in the hill. Scholars have brought four instruments to it, and none has named the king. Kings came first, as Cooke’s reasoning showed, and a reference work of 1992 called the identification the “nearly unanimous view.” Rendsburg and Schniedewind adopt it and say in a footnote that there is “no absolute proof.”

Then came the alphabet. Its letters fit the decades around 700 BC. Letter forms are dated by setting them beside writing of known date, and because this inscription is itself one of the standards, the argument is partly circular. Rendsburg and Schniedewind hear in its Hebrew the speech of the north, and picture a literate builder among refugees from the fallen northern kingdom, a reading that assumes the late date.

Then came plaster. Radiocarbon measures when a plant or animal died and says nothing of the hand that used it. Amos Frumkin’s team of geologists reported on the tunnel in 2003, and the press release said the work could be “safely attributed” to Hezekiah. Their table gave wood of 822 to 796 BC, and wood can read older than the work, and a plant of 790 to 760 or 690 to 540. The plant’s range is so wide because from 770 to 420 BC the curve that turns radiocarbon into years runs nearly flat, and in that stretch a single date cannot pick a century. The useful result was a stalactite from the ceiling, about 320 BC, which ended the argument that the tunnel belonged to the Maccabean kings of the second century BC. So the tunnel stays where Kings left it. Most scholars have long identified it with the conduit credited to Hezekiah; no text on the spot names him, and the two radiocarbon dates from its oldest plaster are too broad to choose between him and a king a generation or two either side.

Straw is the newest. In 2025 a Jerusalem team reported on a great dam at the mouth of the valley below the city, at least eleven meters high, and straw in its mortar dates it to about 800 BC. The digs were paid for by the City of David Foundation, whose work in Silwan, its opponents say, extends Jewish control there. The same paper calls the date of the tunnel “obscure.” Reich and his colleague Eli Shukron have the tunnel finished decades before Hezekiah, and another group of geologists puts it after him. Reich has also questioned the picture of a race against the Assyrians. A king, he says, could not have seen an attack coming early enough, and the work took years. Chronicles has Hezekiah stopping the springs when Sennacherib came, and lists the channel from the Gihon separately among his works.

The prophet’s own water was probably older. Isaiah 8:6 speaks of “the waters of Shiloah that go softly,” and in a footnote of 1903 Cooke said that this could “hardly refer to this invisible channel,” and pointed to another. That other channel runs along the slope above the tunnel, and it fed the dam dated in 2025. It is probably what Isaiah meant.

Later ninth century · Fixed by the kings it names and the shape of its letters

Fire and Cold Water

Toward sunset on 19 August 1868, among the ruins of Dhiban, the Bible’s Dibon, east of the Dead Sea, four men turned a flat black block over so that a visitor could see its back, and it was blank. The visitor was F. A. Klein, an Alsatian-born Anglican clergyman who had long represented the Church Missionary Society at Jerusalem, and he was traveling under the protection of a Beni Sakhr sheikh’s son. The block was round-topped, a little over a meter high, and its face carried thirty-four lines of writing. Klein had what was left of the light. He measured it, sketched it and collected what letters he could, and he later wrote that he was “the last European who had the privilege of seeing this monument of Hebrew antiquity in its perfect state of preservation.”

Prussia moved first and in secret. Its consul in Jerusalem wrote to Berlin within ten days, Berlin authorized 100 napoleons, and by March 1869 the asking price was 1,000, while a dispatch from the Grand Vizier stalled between pashas. Charles Clermont-Ganneau, official interpreter at the French consulate in Jerusalem and still in his early twenties, went another way. A Jerusalem man named Selim el-Qari had made him a partial copy of the text, and late in 1869 he sent Yaqoub Caravacca with two horsemen to take a squeeze, which is wet paper beaten into the letters and peeled away when dry. A quarrel broke out at the stone, Yaqoub took a lance through the leg, and Sheikh Djemil “threw himself into the hole, at the bottom of which was the stone, snatched the paper still wet which covered it,” and rode off. The paper came apart in seven pieces, and Clermont-Ganneau read the shreds through the sheet, holding them up to a candle.

The fire came next. The Beni Hamida had just suffered a raid by the Ottoman governor, Rashid Pasha, and now the Pasha of Nablus was pressing them through his deputy at Salt to give up the stone for the Prussian contract. They feared a second raid. They built a fire around and under it, threw cold water on it and broke it with boulders, and the pieces, Warren reported, went to the family granaries as blessings on the corn.

Warren was back in the city by the end of that year. On 13 January 1870 one agent brought him and another brought Clermont-Ganneau squeezes of the same two large fragments, and the two men pooled what they had. Two large and eighteen small pieces came back in the end, carrying about 613 of some 1,000 letters, and the rest is read from the torn paper. The Louvre bought the stone in 1873, and it stands there in the open, its surviving pieces set in a smoother restoration.

It was cut in the later ninth century. It has no dig context; its date rests on the kings it names and on the shape of its letters. The speaker is Mesha, king of Moab, and in the English that S. R. Driver, the Oxford Hebraist, printed in 1913 he says that “Omri king of Israel afflicted Moab for many days, because Chemosh was angry with his land.” Chemosh then tells him to go and take Nebo. He says that “the men of Gad had dwelt in the land of ‘Ataroth from of old,” and Numbers 32:34 has the children of Gad building Dibon and Ataroth, though the stone says nothing of how they came there. His god gives him the victory, the land is his again, and “Israel perished with an everlasting destruction,” he says of a kingdom that stood for more than a century after him.

At Nebo he takes something and drags it before his god, and Driver prints it as “the [ves]sels of YAHWEH.” That is the name of Israel’s God, on a stone cut by Israel’s enemy. On the old drawing that shades the surviving pieces, the name stands on original stone. Of the noun before it only the last letters do, and the rest is a restoration.

The Bible tells this war from the other side, and the two accounts do not meet. In 2 Kings 3 three kings ruin Moab and shut Mesha up in Kir-hareseth, he offers his heir on the wall, great wrath falls, and Israel goes home. Mesha has no invasion, no siege and no son on any wall. Cooke remarked in 1903 that each account leaves out its own losses. They also seem to disagree on when the revolt happened, since Kings sets it after Ahab’s death and Mesha says Israel held the land for Omri’s days and “half his son’s days, forty years.” The word can mean son or grandson, and the clash depends on which.

The last lines are the worst preserved, and no one knows how the text ended. Driver’s line 31 runs “And as for Horonen, there dwelt therein” and then a row of dots.

Later ninth century · Fixed by letter forms, and by a city that fell about 733

Six Letters

In the summer of 1993, early in the afternoon, the sun came across the plaza between the outer and inner gates of Dan, in the far north of Israel, and raked a dark stone built into a wall. The dig’s surveyor, Gila Cook, saw letters on it. It lifted out easily, since little of it was embedded, a piece of basalt 32 centimeters by 22, reused as building stone, with parts of thirteen lines on it. Avraham Biran, the director, was eighty-three.

It was a piece of a victory monument in Aramaic, broken and thrown into a wall some time before the wall fell. A king whose name is lost says that his god Hadad went before him, and he boasts of killing kings. Among the broken lines the team found six letters, bytdwd, that could be read as house of David. No dig had ever given that name outside the Bible. Here it stood on an enemy’s stone, in a town that enemy held, cut by a man with no reason to oblige anyone who read Samuel and Kings.

The news reached the people it most concerned as an aside. At a meeting of biblical scholars at Münster that summer, Philip Davies and Thomas Thompson gave the plenary. They were the best-known of the minimalists, for whom the Bible’s kingdoms of David and Solomon were a much later literary creation with little history in them. The find came up at a thinly attended side session. In November Biran presented it in Washington, and sixty members of a seminar stood for him.

In June 1994 the same dig found two more pieces, one in a wall thirteen meters from the first and one laid as paving, and Cook found one of them. That mattered when Giovanni Garbini, an Italian Semitist, charged in 1994 that the first piece was forged, because the stones had come out of a controlled dig before witnesses, and the charge found no hold.

The phrase needs an exact count. The word stands whole on the first piece, with no dot between house and David though the writer dots his words elsewhere. Before it stands a single k, which the editors read as the end of [ml]k, king, a restoration. “King of Israel” is on the same piece. On the other two pieces stand the endings -rm and -yhw, each followed by “son of,” and the editors restored them as Jehoram and Ahaziah, with their fathers, across the place where the pieces meet. No king’s whole name survives, and no father’s. The speaker’s name is nowhere, and that he was Hazael of Damascus is an inference that leans on the same two small pieces. Nothing organic was attached to any of them, so there is no radiocarbon. Most scholars place the inscription in the later ninth century, on the shape of its letters and the events it seems to describe; it had already been broken and reused when the city fell to Assyria about 733.

The fight over the six letters was sharp and short. Davies proposed a place, Thompson pressed the missing dot, and others proposed the temple of a god Dod. Anson Rainey of Tel Aviv replied that such dots are erratic and drop out inside a proper name, and Kenneth Kitchen, a conservative Egyptologist at Liverpool, that no cult, temple or text of a god Dod exists anywhere. Hallvard Hagelia, who wrote the history of the debate and tried to read everything printed, found that most writers since have taken it as house of David. It would mean that a neighbor called Judah’s kings after a David by about 800, about a century and a half after the reign the Bible gives him. The stone gives him no reign and no kingdom of any size. If the restored names are right, the speaker also claims the killing of two kings that Kings gives to Jehu. A stele, a king’s standing stone, is no neutral witness, and the names themselves are uncertain.

The torn paper from Dhiban came back into the story in the same years. In 1992, a year before the find at Dan, André Lemaire of Paris submitted a reading of the dots in Mesha’s line 31 as house of David. From 2015 Michael Langlois, a French epigrapher, and a team went over the stone and two old squeezes with a moving lamp and many photographs of one surface, and in 2018 with light through the paper, and some letters came out clear and some doubtful. Lemaire and, with new imaging, Langlois read house of David at the end of line 31; Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv and two colleagues read a name, perhaps Balak; two other epigraphers call the first reading hypothetical. The stone is broken there and the letters are few. Part of what each reading needs lies on the modern plaster, so both lean on the torn paper.

Then, in 2024, Langlois turned to Dan, in an article known here only through reports of it. He finds a change of handwriting between the large piece and the two small ones, cites a conservator who glued them as saying they do not really join, and raises the possibility of two sister steles. The editors never claimed a clean fit, and wrote in 1995 that the fragments “cannot be joined in an obvious, unequivocal way.” Nadav Na’aman of Tel Aviv had written in 2000 that the broken edges come together neatly, a photograph of 2001 seems to show a shared fracture under the two faces, and Hagelia agreed after looking at the mounted pieces in the Israel Museum. The two claims cannot both stand, and nobody has yet been reported testing them on the stone. If the small pieces leave the large one, the kings’ names lose their ground. The six letters do not move, because they sit on the large piece.

In the Israel Museum the three pieces are mounted together, and the mount closes a gap the stones may not close.

931 and 967 BC · Fixed by the Bible’s own reign lengths, counted back

Counted Back

Edwin Thiele came back from twelve years as a missionary editor in Shanghai and took up, at Chicago, a problem that had beaten most of those who tried it. The reign lengths in Kings do not add up. Israel and Judah run side by side, each king is dated by the other kingdom’s years, and the totals part company. Thiele put five questions to the text: whether a scribe counted a king’s first broken year as his first or started at the next new year, in which month each kingdom began its year, whose system a scribe used when naming a rival king’s years, whether there were coregencies, and whether the method changed over time. The answers made most of the numbers fit.

The hook that joins Kings to Assyria is twelve years. Assyria has Ahab alive in 853 and Jehu paying in 841, and the two short reigns between them in Kings come to twelve on Thiele’s reckoning. From there the sum runs upward. Israel’s reigns cover seventy-eight years above 853, and Solomon’s fourth year falls thirty-six years above that. Counted back from the Assyrian fixed points, the Bible’s reign lengths give about 931 for the division and about 967 for the temple. These are Thiele’s figures, widely printed; others, following Albright, place them up to about a decade lower. Here the chronology stops being Assyria’s and becomes Scripture’s. No outside record names Solomon or dates his reign. The forty years given to him and to David are round figures with no outside tie, and the list of the kings of Tyre, as Josephus reports it, points to about the same decades and no more than that.

The system failed at one place. Thiele could not reconcile the cross-dated years of Hezekiah and set part of the text aside, which his defender Rodger Young regrets, and later scholars, Leslie McFall among them, closed the gap with a coregency, two kings counted at once.

There is one outside touch. On the south wall at Karnak, Shoshenq, who is the Bible’s Shishak, had the god Amun lead rows of captive towns, each a head above a ring with a name in it, and his own figure was only painted and has gone. One ring was read in Champollion’s day as “the king of Judah,” which it is not. The wall lists about 150 places. Those still legible include Megiddo and towns from the Negev to the Jezreel valley, and a block bearing his name was found at Megiddo. Jerusalem cannot be read there. Rows of rings are lost, and Kings says the city paid, so what that silence means is argued. James Henry Breasted of Chicago, the American Egyptologist, read the wall in 1906, counted 156 rings and found 43 lost. “We look in vain for Jerusalem,” he wrote, and then, with a confidence no one can test, “It must have been lost in one of the lacunae.” The wall gives no year. The usual 925 comes from Rehoboam’s fifth year in Kings, though Egypt’s own evidence reaches the same decade.

Yigael Yadin, who was the visitor at Lachish in 1973, had been chief of staff of the Israeli army before he went back to archaeology, and he opened Hazor in the 1950s with 1 Kings 9:15 in mind, where Solomon builds “Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer.” He found a six-chambered gate at Hazor and recognized the same plan at the other two. The pottery that dated them belonged to a phase now reckoned about a century wide, and every stone building of those decades was dated by the same pots. Finkelstein’s reply, the Low Chronology, began in 1996 with a plain objection: the tenth-century date for these buildings was never independent of the verse. Start instead, he said, from the levels themselves and from short-lived seeds. On that footing monumental Megiddo belongs to the ninth century and Omri’s house, and the tenth-century highlands show no great kingdom’s buildings. He was not alone, since a team at Dor had reached a low date from the coast.

Finkelstein and his chief opponent, Amihai Mazar of the Hebrew University, then spent years on the difference between a beam and an olive pit. A beam may be a century older than the wall it holds up, and a pit dates one harvest. By 2010 the two sides were a few decades apart in years. What remained was the whole question, whether the great buildings were Omri’s or Solomon’s.

Yadin’s three matching gates were once the best-known proof text in the field. At Megiddo two of the dig’s own directors have since left him in different directions: Ussishkin moved the gate to a later level, and Finkelstein keeps it in Yadin’s level but dates that level to the ninth century. Others still hold it to the tenth. The level below the one Yadin gave the gate has been sampled at last. Four dates from it, in a study of 2023 as one later paper gives them, read 961, 928, 869 and 858 BC, and that paper takes them for the whole life of one city, from the middle of the tenth century to the middle of the ninth.

Jerusalem has given less. A 2024 study led by Johanna Regev of the Weizmann Institute found people in the city through the twelfth to tenth centuries, and dated a wall long credited to Hezekiah to about 730 to 710, a little earlier than it had been placed. Of the eighteen early dates only three came with pottery of the period, so “people” is the right word. Eilat Mazar, who dug the Large Stone Structure on the ridge, believed she had found David’s palace; the dating of what she found is still argued.

The newest radiocarbon study, from the American dig at Gezer, places Gezer’s monumental level in the first half of the tenth century, on few dates, and its excavators read this as compatible with the biblical kings. The Low Chronology camp has not accepted it. The seeds came from a building near the gate and from no part of the gate. The same paper takes a story away from the other side, finding it unlikely that the fire Pharaoh set at Gezer in 1 Kings 9:16 is the burned layer long pointed to.

Gezer gave something else. In 1 Samuel 13:21 the Philistines’ price for sharpening Israel’s tools turned on a word nobody could read, and the King James printed “a file,” with “a file with mouths” in the margin. A small weight marked pim then came out of the ground there and another turned up in Jerusalem, and Samuel Raffaeli, a Jerusalem coin expert who owned one, saw in 1914 what the word did to the verse: the price was a weight, about two-thirds of a shekel. The Rev. Herbert Bishop, putting the Old Testament into Ronga in Portuguese East Africa, wrote the word into his text, and /measures has the rest of the story. The World English Bible reads “one payim each.”

c. 1208 BC · Fixed by Egypt’s reign lengths, counted back

His Seed Is Not

In the 1896 season at western Thebes, a slab of dark stone over ten feet high lay on its face against a column base in the ruin of the temple of the pharaoh Merneptah. Petrie had found it, and he called it “the great prize.” Wilhelm Spiegelberg, a German scholar then at Thebes to study its graffiti, made a hand copy of the long text “at a disadvantage, as it lay face downward.”

The stone had been through several reigns before that. It began as a stele of Amenhotep III. Akhenaten’s men hacked the figures of the god Amun from its face, Sety I restored them and said so, and when Merneptah built his temple out of Amenhotep’s blocks, his workmen turned the slab around and cut a victory poem on its rough back. Near the end of the poem, in Breasted’s English of 1906, comes the line “Israel is desolated, his seed is not.”

In the fifth year of Merneptah, by the usual reckoning about 1208 BC, an Egyptian victory poem named Israel among the peoples of Canaan, and its scribe marked the name as a people and not a town. The places around it carry the sign for a foreign land, and Israel carries a seated man and woman, the sign for a people, though what kind of people the sign cannot say. Petrie’s own first response was a puzzle. He set out five ways of squaring the name with the Bible and leaned toward a part of Israel that had stayed behind in Palestine. “His seed is not” turned out to be no more specific. Breasted found the same words used of Libyans and of northern invaders, and he called them “a conventional phrase applicable to any defeated and plundered people,” so the line cannot be Pharaoh’s killing of the boys in Exodus 1.

Year 5 is on the stone, and the year 1208 is not. Egypt’s dates are a ladder of reign lengths tied to absolute time at a few astronomical points, and one radiocarbon model sets Merneptah up to about three decades higher. Whatever the date of the exodus, a people called Israel was in Canaan by about 1208, and no earlier mention of the name outside the Bible is agreed.

From the thirteenth century, small unwalled villages spread over the central hills. Surveys since 1967, as Finkelstein reports them, counted about 250 new hilltop communities over a few generations, most of them tiny. Their people left few signs of where they came from. Finkelstein, William Dever, Avraham Faust and Anson Rainey part over their origins, yet each sees at least part of early Israel in them, and Merneptah’s stele shows that the name already existed.

One rung higher is a find no scholar made. In 1887 local people carrying off Akhenaten’s bricks for their own houses, at the city now called Amarna, came on a chamber of many hundreds of clay tablets. Dealers sent some to Oppert in Paris, who pronounced them forgeries. Later, when they seemed nearly worthless, a quantity went to Luxor in sacks and was largely ground to pieces on the way, and what survives, Petrie wrote, “is but a wreck of what might have been.” It is the correspondence of Egypt with its vassals in the fourteenth century BC, and the king of Byblos who complained of his cage is in it. The letters show Canaan as a patchwork of small kings under Egypt, troubled by Hapiru, a word for uprooted men and not the name of one people.

Among the small kings in the letters was the king of Jerusalem, Abdi-Heba, who told Pharaoh that the king had no land left and that the Hapiru had wasted all. At the end of one letter he went past the king to the man who would read it out. Petrie’s abstract gives it: “To the scribe of my lord the king.” Bring these words aloud before the king, it says: “The whole territory of my lord, the king, is going to ruin.”

c. 1446 BC · Fixed by 1 Kings 6:1

The Four Hundred and Eightieth Year

Open a Bible at 1 Kings 6:1 and take up a pencil. “In the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel had come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign.” Solomon’s fourth year, on the count just made, is about 967. The four hundred and eightieth year lies 479 years after the first, so the exodus falls about 1446. That is arithmetic and not evidence. The whole ladder can now be written on one line: 763, 90, 78, 36, 479. The first figure is an astronomer’s and the second a clerk’s, and all the rest are Scripture’s.

No inscription yet found records the exodus or names Moses, so its date is argued from the Bible’s own numbers and from what the ground does and does not show. Two dates are in play, about 1446 and the thirteenth century, and the numbers are less simple than one verse makes them look. Add up the Bible’s own periods from Solomon back to the exodus and the total comes to between 633 and 650 years. The Greek of 1 Kings 6:1 has 440. Four hundred and eighty may be twelve generations of forty, and Jephthah’s three hundred years in Judges 11:26 fits the early date if a round number in a border dispute is taken at its word. James Hoffmeier, an evangelical Egyptologist who defends the thirteenth century, says that every reader harmonizes something. Bryant Wood, an archaeologist who defends the fifteenth, answers that 1 Chronicles 6 has nineteen generations from Moses to Solomon and not twelve.

Four witnesses are called from the ground, and none of them settles it. The first is a name. The Raamses of Exodus has a known namesake: the Delta capital of Ramesses II at Qantir. Those who follow the late date take the verse at that word. Those who follow the early date read the name as a later label on an older place. The ground cannot decide between them.

The second is Hazor, where Yadin dug. Its last Canaanite city burned, by his reckoning about 1230, with its palace and temples at the center of the fire and its statues beheaded, while the houses were largely spared. Who did it is argued among the excavators themselves, who have also looked for the palace archive and not found it. Those who date Joshua late credit him; those who date him early credit Israel in Deborah’s day and look to an older burning for Joshua; others look to a revolt from within.

Jericho is the third, and it has passed through many hands, most of which moved the date. Canaan had two ages before iron that matter here, the Middle Bronze and the Late Bronze, and the question at Jericho has always been in which of them the great fire on the mound fell. Carl Watzinger, who dug there before the First World War, said by 1600 at the latest. John Garstang, digging from 1930 to 1936, called it Late Bronze, within reach of Joshua, and thought he had the fallen wall. Kathleen Kenyon came back from 1952 to 1958, cut the mound in squares with walls of earth left standing between them, and moved the fire out of Joshua’s reach again, to about 1580, on her reading of the pottery. She thought radiocarbon too crude to help, so her own samples sat for decades.

The walled city of Jericho burned. Kenyon set the fire at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, and radiocarbon on its charred grain, published by Hendrik Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht in 1995, points to the sixteenth century or a little before, well ahead of the late fifteenth-century date reached from 1 Kings 6:1. Wood and others read the pottery as Late Bronze, near 1400, and Piotr Bienkowski answered that the pottery Wood cited was Middle Bronze and his painted sherds ordinary later ware. At Tell el-Dab’a in Egypt radiocarbon runs about 120 years older than dates tied to the dynasties, a gap still unexplained, and a reader who holds the early date can appeal to it. Radiocarbon agrees with the dynasties elsewhere, however, and the mound’s present excavators keep the fire near 1550. Later building on the mound shows some Late Bronze life, on a smaller scale. Believing writers do not line up on any of this: Alan Dickin, a Christian geochemist, reads the same grain against 1446, sets the fire about 1535 and proposes an exodus about 1575. Whether the wall of Joshua 6 is among the walls on the mound, nothing found there can say, since nothing found there names Israel or Joshua.

Ai is the fourth. Albright named the hill of et-Tell as Ai from a survey in the 1920s. Judith Marquet-Krause dug it from 1933 to 1935 and found a walled city of the Early Bronze Age, then abandonment, nothing of the Middle or Late Bronze Age, and an Iron Age village on top. She died on 1 July 1936, aged about thirty, with the work unfinished. Joseph Callaway’s later dig found the same gap, and Martin Noth, the German Old Testament scholar, observed that the name Ai means ruin and took the story for an explanation of one. If Ai is et-Tell, the usual identification since Albright, nothing stood there in the Late Bronze Age. One team has argued for a small fortress at Khirbet el-Maqatir instead, and its Bronze Age evidence is still awaiting full publication.

The later date has sites to explain too. Wood points out that Jericho and Ai show no destruction in the late thirteenth century either, that the towns which did burn then, Gezer, Aphek, Megiddo and Beth Shan, are ones the Bible says Israel could not take, and that a Joshua at Hazor in 1230 leaves no city for the Jabin of Judges 4:2 to reign in. Failures have fallen on believers’ own digs as well. Siegfried Horn, who had spent seven years in prison camps in Java and India teaching Greek and Hebrew to his fellow inmates, took a dig to Tell Hesban in 1968 to find the city of Sihon. It did not find what it came for, and its directors published that.

The room in which all this is argued is smaller than it looks. Hoffmeier and Wood agree on one awkward fact, which is that scholars leaving the late date do not join the early one. They give up on a conquest altogether. So the debate between 1446 and the thirteenth century is a debate among those who think there is something to date.

Some evangelical scholars count straight from 1 Kings 6:1 and reach about 1446. Others take the 480 as a figure for twelve generations and place the event in the thirteenth century, chiefly because of the name Raamses. Each reading has a text it must explain. Each has sites it must explain too. Many historians outside this debate doubt that a single exodus and conquest can be recovered at all.

The date is Scripture’s, and the ground does not decide it.

c. 1876 BC, then no date · Fixed by the 430 years, and no further

The Bottom of Everything

The pencil has one more step to take. Counted with Paul, from the promise to Abraham to the law, the 430 years reach about 1876 BC, some 215 years in Canaan and some 215 in Egypt; honest readers have long differed over how to count them. Genesis’s ages run on past Abraham, and a reader may go on adding. This page stops at him. Above that line stands the Flood, which has no date here. What it has is clay.

On 14 May 1873 George Smith rode into the khan, the travelers’ inn, at Mosul, met his friend Charles Kerr, come from Aleppo, and sat down to brush the day’s clay fragments clean. He had begun work on the mounds of Nineveh a week before, on a London newspaper’s money. Among the fragments he found “the greater portion of seventeen lines” of a story he knew, “fitting into the only place where there was a serious blank in the story.” He had guessed that about fifteen lines were missing.

He knew the story because of a tablet in the British Museum. Sorting the fragments of an Assyrian royal library, he had come on K.3375, one side legible and the other under a thick lime-like crust. Robert Ready, the Museum’s repairer, was away for weeks, and the Keeper would let nobody else touch it. When Ready had cleaned it and Smith had read the lines, he said “I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion,” rushed about the room, and “began to undress himself!” All of that comes from E. A. Wallis Budge, a later Keeper at the Museum, in one paragraph about Ready printed fifty-three years afterward, with no source and no claim to have been there. Smith’s own books say nothing of it, and Budge himself says Smith had already suspected what the tablet held. The usual telling leaves out Ready.

The tablet told of a storm, a ship and a window. “I sat down and wept, over my face flowed my tears,” ran Smith’s English of 1876. “I sent forth a dove and it left. The dove went and turned, and a resting-place it did not find, and it returned.” Then came a swallow, and then a raven, which saw the water going down and did not come back. Readers of Genesis 8 needed no commentary. Smith lectured on 3 December 1872 with Rawlinson in the chair and Gladstone on the platform, and the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph offered a thousand guineas to send him to Nineveh. His cable about the seventeen lines appeared in the paper with words he said he never sent, “as the season is closing,” the proprietors took the job for done, and the dig stopped a few weeks after it had begun.

The seventeen lines did not belong in that gap. The fragment, DT 42, comes from another poem altogether, the story of Atrahasis, which nobody then knew existed. Smith seems to have printed its lines straight into his translation of 1876 with no note. A little further on in that book he met a different hole and said so: “Here there is a serious blank in the inscription,” he wrote, and “I conjecturally insert a fragment.” He died at Aleppo on 19 August 1876, aged thirty-six.

K.3375 was copied at Nineveh in the seventh century BC. The fullest copy of Atrahasis dates to about 1630 BC on the usual reckoning, and pieces reached the Hittite capital and Ugarit by about 1300. None of these is the date of the story, because a copy dates only itself.

Friedrich Delitzsch of Berlin told the Kaiser in 1902 that the tale, “precisely as it is here written, afterwards travelled to Canaan.” The Kaiser wrote to an admiral on 15 February 1903 that “Professor Delitzsch, the theologian, has run away with Professor Delitzsch, the historian,” and in the same letter he wrote a sentence nobody expected from that quarter: “We carry on excavations and publish the results in behalf of science and history, but not to conform or attack religious hypotheses.” Many critical scholars still hold some literary dependence. Alan Millard, who co-edited Atrahasis, answers that the differences in form and theology would need revision on a scale shown for no other ancient text, and that “it has yet to be shown that there was borrowing, even indirectly.” Who borrowed from whom, if there was borrowing, cannot be settled by anyone. The tablets show the age and spread of the story.

For a generation scholars thought the ground could go further. A colleague’s remark to Gadd in 1926, that a tablet from Nuzi was a “very remarkable parallel” to Rachel’s theft of the household gods, grew into a whole patriarchal age. An American archaeologist wrote that Abraham’s life and times “fit perfectly within the early second millennium,” and a German bestseller of 1955 announced in its title that the Bible was right after all. Thompson and John Van Seters took the structure apart in 1974 and 1975, and believers finished the cleaning. Martin Selman, an evangelical scholar, went through the customs one by one and found much of the case “founded more on the shifting sands of enthusiasm.” The Nuzi tablets themselves fall in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, later than any date the argument needed. The rule that came out of it, which Kitchen and Selman both grant, is that a parallel dates a text only if the custom is confined to one period. When Ebla’s tablets were said in the 1970s to name the cities of Genesis 14, Kitchen, whose side had most to gain, asked in print how Ebla related to the Old Testament and, with a mischievous twinkle he admitted to, offered as a first reply: “Not at all!”

Leonard Woolley’s shaft at Ur, in southern Iraq, is where that confidence went deepest. He hit a bed of clean clay a little over eight feet thick, with one fragment of fossil bone in it and flints and painted pottery beneath it, and in his book of 1929 he wrote that “there could be no doubt” this was the Flood on which the story of Noah is based. Two pages on he was more careful: it was “not universal, but a local disaster,” and the find “does not of course prove any single detail” of the story. The bed is missing from other shafts at Ur and from Eridu seven miles off, the flood layers at Kish and Shuruppak fall centuries later, and Woolley’s own assistant, Max Mallowan, rejected the identification. No date for the Flood can be had from any of it.

Before all that, the diggers had come down through rubbish and pottery to clean silt, and they stopped. “The workmen declared that we had come to the bottom of everything, to the river silt of which the original delta was formed, and at first, looking at the sides of the shaft, I was disposed to agree with them.” Then he saw that they were too high up. “I sent the men back to work to deepen the hole.”

1872–1889, then 1947 · Fixed by the seller

False from First to Last

Clermont-Ganneau sat in the London office of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1872, the year of Smith’s lecture, going through watercolors of more than two hundred Moabite pots. Conder and his colleague Tyrwhitt Drake had made them in Jerusalem, and both men believed in what they had painted. Mesha’s stone had made Moabite letters famous, and here within three years of its breaking were urns, figurines and tablets thick with the same script. Conder had read the name of Jehovah on one. Clermont-Ganneau answered that they were false from first to last, and he named a suspect on the spot. Selim el-Qari, who had made him the partial copy of the Mesha stone, wrote the same deformed letters. That is the accuser’s own account, written thirteen years later, and by then the copy hung in the Louvre to the left of the stone.

Berlin bought anyway, with imperial money, for what Clermont-Ganneau believed was 20,000 thalers, and the matter was still being argued in the Prussian Landtag on 16 March 1876. He traced the pots through the potters of Jerusalem, and an apprentice said he had carried pieces by night under his cloak, afraid of the patrols. Several of the seller’s associates confessed, and by 1874 had withdrawn their confessions, saying they had been bribed, threatened or beaten. Selim put his confession in writing in 1877, which the accuser admits may have been revenge. Berlin paid for pottery that Jerusalem potters had made. Whether the dealer who sold it on knew is not shown by any of this.

The dealer was Shapira, the man who had read twelve hundred cubits at Siloam, a Jew from what is now Ukraine who had become a Christian on his way to Palestine. He kept a shop on Christian Street in Jerusalem with postcards, pressed flowers and olive wood in front and manuscripts in a back room, and the British Museum bought hundreds of his real manuscripts. In 1883 he came to Europe with fifteen blackened leather strips, folded, and a story of Bedouin, a cave, linen wrappings and a black coating, which everyone found absurd. The text was a Deuteronomy with differences, and its Ten Commandments carried an added line, “Thou shalt not hate your brother in your heart.” A committee met at the house of the Egyptologist Karl Lepsius in Berlin on 10 July, took a reported ninety minutes while Shapira waited next door, and called it “a clever and impudent forgery.”

London took about six weeks. Shapira asked the British Museum for a reported million pounds. Two fragments went on show in a case that Clermont-Ganneau called “very ill-lighted and difficult of approach,” crowds came, and Gladstone met the dealer. Sayce wrote in The Academy that “It is really demanding too much of Western credulity.” Clermont-Ganneau had a few minutes with two or three pieces, announced forgery in The Times of 21 August ahead of the Museum’s own expert, Christian Ginsburg, and proposed that the strips had been cut from the margins of old synagogue scrolls, a theory never demonstrated and never refuted.

Shapira wrote to Ginsburg. “You have made a fool of me,” the letter said, and he was not convinced of forgery “unless M Ganneau did it!” He spoke of not surviving the shame, and The Times reported it with the comment “This, we venture to think, he will not do.” Punch ran a cartoon with a hook-nosed Shapira. The next March he shot himself in a hotel in Rotterdam.

Sixty-four years after that letter somebody took leather scrolls to a cobbler in Bethlehem, Khalil Eskander Shahin, called Kando, apparently because they were leather. These were the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls. By the account the Bedouin later gave, there had been a cave and jars, and some of the scrolls were wrapped in linen and blackened, and the excavators later found a black substance soaked into the wrappings. The first public statement about them, from Yale in April 1948, said they had “been preserved for many centuries in the library” of a monastery, which was false. Most of the nine hundred or so manuscripts from the Qumran caves reached scholars through a market, on the word of the people who sold them, and they are what they appear to be, as the pages on the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint tell. Solomon Zeitlin of Philadelphia set Shapira against them in 1949 and called them a hoax in 1950.

In 2021 Idan Dershowitz, a Hebrew Bible scholar, reopened the strips on the strength of that likeness. He argued that Bedouin, cave, linen and coating were absurd only until 1947, that Shapira’s surviving draft, with its errors and question marks, is the work of a man deciphering and not composing, and that the text is an ancestor of Deuteronomy. Matthieu Richelle, Ronald Hendel, Jonathan Klawans and Jeffrey Stackert have answered him in print, on the script as it survives in sketches and on the text itself. Sidnie White Crawford, a scroll scholar who doubts him, told a reporter that the question rests on the material, which cannot be tested, and on the handwriting. The handwriting is known now only from copies. No one living has seen the strips, and no test can now be run.

The trail is short. Shapira’s widow sent two small pieces to a German professor. Sotheby’s sold the rest in 1885 for £10 5s to the bookseller Bernard Quaritch, who listed them at £25 and showed them in 1887. On 8 March 1889, if the report is right, Dr. Philip Brookes Mason showed “the whole of” the scroll at a lecture in Burton-on-Trent, and nobody has reported seeing it since.

The last years of Judah · Fixed by a burned room

We Cannot See Azekah

The way back down through the Bible begins in a burned room at Lachish. On 29 January 1935, between the gates of Tell ed-Duweir, Starkey’s diggers began to lift soot-black sherds out of a layer of ash about fifteen centimeters deep. Within weeks Sir Charles Marston, who helped pay for the dig, was telling The Times that they were thought to have been used to level a wall before plastering. The idea did not last. There was ink on them, and the ink was Hebrew: letters, or something like letters, written on broken pots.

Starkey was in his third season at the true Lachish, with about a hundred villagers digging. The room is called a guardroom only because of where it stands, walled on three sides and open to the north, with a stone bench. Sixteen inscribed sherds came from the room, in the last Judean town level, so none is later than the town’s end. The standard editions set them just before that end, perhaps about 589; Abigail Zammit’s Oxford reappraisal of 2016, made with all twenty-one of the site’s sherds under the lens, argues that the group is mixed and may reach back to Jehoiakim. They lay among hundreds of plain jar fragments. The town’s end by fire is generally laid to Nebuchadnezzar’s final campaign, though none of the sherds names Babylon, a Chaldean, a Judean king or an enemy.

That did not restrain the first editor. Harry Torczyner, the Jerusalem scholar who was given the edition, read or restored “the prophet” in five places, made him the Uriah of Jeremiah 26, and called the third sherd a document that “may be considered as an authentic chapter of the Holy Scriptures.” D. Winton Thomas of Cambridge went through them in 1946 and left one prophet, with no name. An American scholar, Cyrus Gordon, turned a name Torczyner had read as Jeremiah on another sherd into “my lord,” and Albright said Uriah had become “a head of King Charles,” Dickens’s phrase for a fixed idea. The writer of the third sherd swears an oath about reading a letter, and scholars have taken him three ways: that no scribe had ever needed to read to him, that he could read every letter and repeat it, or that he had not understood it at all. The plainest voice of those years is not at Lachish at all. A generation or so earlier, at a coastal fort, a reaper seems to have had a skilled scribe write a plea to an official for a garment taken from him, with no greeting, a case close to one Exodus 22:26 provides for. Nothing shows whether he got it back.

Jeremiah 34:7 says that when the king of Babylon’s army was at Jerusalem it was fighting also “against Lachish and against Azekah; for these alone remained of the cities of Judah as fortified cities.” The sentence that made the sherds famous ends the fourth. The writer says that he and his men are watching the signals of Lachish, as his lord has instructed, and then: ky lʾ nrʾh ʾt ʿzqh. The printed rendering is “we cannot see Azekah.” Two towns left, and a man on a hill who could not see one of them: for most of a century readers have heard the end of Judah in that line. Torczyner reasoned that an officer would not report mere geography. He took this for the fall of Azekah, and many still do; others read a line of sight or a drill. The Hebrew says literally that we do not see it, and the “no longer” of popular accounts is not there. Jeremiah states what he states, and the sherd does not repeat it. Azekah lies about eighteen kilometers from the mound, on a line of hills.

A man who is watching the signals of Lachish is not at Lachish. The sherd lay there because it was sent or kept there, and nobody knows who wrote it or where he stood. Hoshayahu, the name usually given to the sender, is on the third sherd alone.

Starkey did not live to see the argument. On 10 January 1938, in the Arab Revolt, he was on the road from the dig to Jerusalem when five men with white headscarves drawn across their faces stopped the car near Hebron and ordered him out. Once they had identified him as the director of the dig they told the driver to go. A few meters on, the driver heard two shots and saw Starkey fall in his mirror. Whether they were bandits, rebel gangs or, on a thesis still being argued in 2026, men in a land dispute with the dig, nobody has settled. He is buried on Mount Zion.

A study of 2002 drew the lines of sight on a map. Mareshah, it found, is the one Iron Age fortress in the area from which Lachish can be seen and Azekah cannot. If the writer stood there, he could never have seen Azekah at all, and the line would report no news.

597 BC, then 586 or 587 · Fixed by a chronicle, and then by no tablet at all

The Eleventh Year

A small clay tablet in the British Museum says that in his seventh year the king of Babylon marched west, besieged “the city of Judah,” took it on the second of Adar, seized its king, and set up another “of his own choice.” It names neither king, and the word Jerusalem is not in the line. No one doubts what it means. The Babylonian calendar turns that day into the middle of March 597, firm to the day, which is the capture of the city, before any exile began.

The tablet stops in Nebuchadnezzar’s eleventh year, and the next one has not been found. In 2 Kings 25:9 the captain of his guard “burned Yahweh’s house, the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem.” That was in the summer of 586, or by another count 587. Fixed by what? No Babylonian record of it survives, and the Bible’s regnal years convert to either, depending on how Judah’s scribes counted them and when their year began. So the date every reader of Kings would most like to have was never in the short list of firm dates, and the list skipped it without saying so. A regnal year is a king’s year. 2 Kings 25:8 and Jeremiah 52:12 call this one Nebuchadnezzar’s nineteenth, and Jeremiah 52:29 puts a deportation from Jerusalem in his eighteenth. Jeremy Hughes, an Old Testament chronologist, went through the experts and found eleven on each side, and each side is left with something it has to explain. This page prints 586 from here on.

No laboratory has settled it, and none has tried. Regev’s team in 2024 took 586 as a historical anchor for its sequence of dates. A team reading the magnetic record of a burned building in the Givati Parking Lot took “August, 586” as its date from the start. Fourteen of Regev’s fifteen samples from the destruction sat off the calibration curve, in the flat stretch where a single date cannot choose a century, let alone a year. The science takes the year as given, and it cannot then be quoted for it.

What the ground has is the fire. That building, Structure 100, survives as a burn layer of the early sixth century, attributed without serious dissent to the Babylonian sack. Its bottom story was packed with up to 2.3 meters of stone, ash and charcoal, and among them lay fifty-four tilted pieces of a fine floor from the story above, which had cooled where they fell.

Across the ridge on the eastern slope, in 1982, Yigal Shiloh of the Hebrew University opened a house that burned at the same end, and in it were fifty-one sealings. A sealing is a lump of clay pressed over the string that closed a papyrus and stamped with a seal; it is not the seal, and it is no use without the document it closed. Forty-one could be read. One carries the name Gemaryahu son of Shaphan, the name of a scribe’s son in Jeremiah 36, which is a match of names and nothing more. Seventeen more sealings lay in a juglet in a storeroom at Lachish, with the marks of string and papyrus on their backs, and both lots came out of the ground before witnesses. The fifty-one in Jerusalem had been baked hard by the fire that burned what they sealed.

Two dates, perhaps two centuries apart · Fixed by pots and wood, and by letter forms alone

Bless You and Keep You

The people of those burned houses blessed one another in words that can still be read. The words stand on two objects, one from long before the fire and one from its last generation or after it. The first comes from Kuntillet Ajrud, a lone hill in northern Sinai about fifty kilometers south of Kadesh Barnea. Ze’ev Meshel of Tel Aviv dug it in three short seasons in 1975 and 1976 and found a stone building 29 meters by 15, with one door on the east and no altar, where the dry air had saved wood and some 120 pieces of cloth. There were big storage jars with writing on them. After the peace with Egypt everything went back, out of reach of scholars, and the edition of 2012 had to reprint old facsimiles, so that the most argued words in the field are read from photographs.

Early in the eighth century, at a remote station on the Sinai track, writers with northern names and spellings wrote blessings by YHWH of Samaria and of Teman and, on the usual rendering, his asherah. YHWH is the four letters of the name this page elsewhere writes Yahweh. Asherah was a great goddess of Canaan, and in Kings the word is also a wooden pole set up in worship, and headlines have given Israel’s God a wife on the strength of that line. The verbs that follow are singular, so the blessing comes from YHWH alone. On the word itself one letter decides everything. Hebrew names do not normally take a “his,” so some scholars read an object or emblem, others read the goddess’s own name with an ending that is no pronoun, and some say the two ran together. Judith Hadley, whose lower case this page follows, argues at length with Pirhiya Beck against finding Yahweh in the odd figures drawn on the same jar.

Kings had said as much first. It has Israel setting up “pillars and Asherah poles on every high hill,” Manasseh putting an image of Asherah in the temple, and Josiah carrying it out and burning it.

One jar has, in Nadav Na’aman’s English, “May He bless you and may He keep you.” Numbers 6:24 has “Yahweh bless you, and keep you.” The pair belongs to more than Israel. A letter of the thirteenth century from Ugarit, found at Aphek, has the gods of Ugarit bless and keep its reader, and a dedication at Ekron has a goddess bless and guard the ruler who set it up. The same pairing stood in the mouths of Israel’s neighbors, addressed to other gods. On the plaster of a building at Deir Alla, east of the Jordan, a text in black and red ink names Balaam son of Beor as a seer of the gods, so one prophet of the book of Numbers had a life among those neighbors too.

The words turn up again in a tomb. Ketef Hinnom, on the slope across the valley from Jerusalem, has a repository cut under a burial chamber, where old remains were swept to make room for new ones. It held over a thousand objects and the bones of at least ninety-five people, with no layers to tell them apart, and its pottery falls in two groups, one before the exile and one after it. Two silver amulets from that repository, dated by their editors to the last Judean generations, carry words of the priestly blessing and the name YHWH; Renz and Na’aman date them after the exile. Each is a tiny sheet of silver rolled tight, and opening them took three years. There is no scientific date. The words are in two hands and run shorter than the Hebrew text of Numbers, and whether they quote that book or share a blessing with it is argued. On one of them somebody smoothed out some letters and wrote them again.

Gabriel Barkay, who dug them, took the worn outer edges of the silver for long wear. Whoever wore it is one of at least ninety-five people.

Early 591 BC · Fixed by a scribe’s date on one tablet of four

Oil for the King of Judah

The king the Babylonians seized in 597 was alive in Babylon when Jerusalem burned, and five years before that the palace was feeding him. Near a staircase in a vaulted building at the northeast of the South Palace, the German dig that ended in 1917 found about 300 tablets, probably fallen from a floor that no longer exists. In 1939 Ernst Weidner published parts of four of them, lists of sesame oil handed out at the palace, one dated to early 591. Of 346 tablets in those groups about 80 can now be located. Among the four is a line that gives one ban, about six liters, to Ya’u-kin, king of Judah, who is Jehoiachin. Weidner misread the amount, which was six times the average ration, and five sons are named as a group. The clerk wrote “king of Judah” while Zedekiah sat on the throne in Jerusalem. These are not the king’s rations of 2 Kings 25, which belong to his release thirty years later. Kings has thirty-seven years in prison, and the list shows a family fed by the palace.

The people deported in those years left a better record, and it comes with a difficulty. Some hundreds of clay tablets from a place called the town of Judah, and villages near it, run from 572 to 477, a whole community buying, renting and marrying under Babylonian and Persian kings, in a village that bore the name of what they had lost about fifteen years after they lost it. Nobody calls them forged, because their bulk and detail would be absurd to fake. Bought, not excavated; the village’s site is unknown. A collector who holds more than a hundred of them told a newspaper that he bought them in the United States in the 1990s from someone who had bought at auction in the 1970s. Tero Alstola, whose study of these exiles is the fullest, finds that improbable, since the name was unknown until 1999 and Iraq has confiscated tablets of the same group.

The Babylon of the book of Daniel has been harder ground. On 18 March 1854 the Athenaeum printed a letter from Henry Rawlinson. “I hasten to communicate,” he began, a discovery he had made from clay cylinders dug at Ur by a British vice-consul, J. E. Taylor. The eldest son of Nabonidus, last king of Babylon, had been named Belshazzar, and “he was admitted by his father to a share in the government.” Until then Belshazzar had been known from Daniel and from writers who depended on it. Daniel, Rawlinson said, “forms one of the bulwarks of our religion.”

The cylinders say firstborn, in a prayer, and nothing about government. That was Rawlinson’s own step. Driver wrote in 1900 that the idea of a joint rule was “destitute of foundation in the inscriptions.” Tablets of the twelfth year then came to light, the first in 1915 or 1916, with men swearing by the king and by Belshazzar together, and in 1924 a hostile poem of the Persian age was printed which says that Nabonidus “entrusted the kingship” to his son. Rawlinson’s confidence had run seventy years ahead of his evidence, and the evidence caught up with it.

It caught up only so far. No Babylonian document calls Belshazzar king, and no chronicle records his death. Driver’s other objection has no document against it: Belshazzar’s father was Nabonidus and not Nebuchadnezzar, and no inscription of Nabonidus claims a tie, though “father” can mean forebear and a marriage has been proposed. When Belshazzar offers Daniel the place of “third ruler in the kingdom,” the words can be read, if the title means what the old versions took it to mean, as the etiquette of a man who was himself only second. Of Darius the Mede there is less. He is known from Daniel alone, and readers have long differed over whether he was a king known to history by another name or a figure of the story.

A copy of the book has now been dated. In 2025 a team led by Mladen Popovic of Groningen reported on 4Q114, a fragment from the fourth Qumran cave, whose contents came largely by purchase. The carbon curve folds in those centuries, so one measurement gives two ranges. A copy of Daniel’s last chapters gave a carbon result with two humps, 355 to 285 BC and 230 to 160, and the team kept the later because the hand does not fit dated documents of the fourth century. Those who place the chapters in the 160s, in the Greek persecution they seem to foresee, read this as a copy made almost at once. Those who hold the book older note that the range opens well before the 160s. The fragment cannot settle it: a copy dates only itself.

The clay barrel called the Cyrus Cylinder has had a louder public life than any of these. It is a Babylonian building text in Cyrus’s name, which sends gods home to cities east of the Tigris, gathers their people, and says nothing of Judah. In 1971 Princess Ashraf of Iran gave a replica to U Thant at the United Nations as a declaration of human rights, and in November 2025 UNESCO adopted a resolution on the same theme. The decree in Ezra stays Ezra’s. The cylinder shows the kind of thing Ezra describes, done for other people’s gods. Of the return itself, for all the names in Ezra 2, the ground has no stone to show.

Far up the Nile, at Elephantine, Judeans had a temple of their own. In 407 by the modern reckoning, Yedoniah and the priests there wrote to the governor of Judea that Egyptian priests and a Persian officer had destroyed it three years before. It was old, they said: “when Cambyses came into Egypt he found that temple built.” They had written about it at the time to the high priest at Jerusalem and to the nobles. “They have not sent any letter to us.”

AD 52 · Fixed by what?

Just Where He Ought to Be

The way down reaches the New Testament at a pool. In July 1888 the editor of the Palestine Exploration Fund’s journal announced the discovery of the Pool of Bethesda. Monks digging near the church of St. Anne had come on a tank, Schick had found a second to the west of it, and the editor reasoned that a pool with five porticoes must be a double one, with a portico along each side and a fifth on the wall between. He had John 5:2, “a pool, which is called in Hebrew, ‘Bethesda’, having five porches,” and Cyril of Jerusalem in the fourth century, who has “four surrounding it and one in the middle.” The British officer Charles Wilson had sketched such a pool the year before “on some such plan,” and had fitted it to the wrong pool.

The tanks would not last either. The French architect C. Mauss had come on the first in 1873, and it was kept quiet for fifteen years while the neighboring plots were bought, since the prices would have soared. From 1888 pilgrims were led down to a narrow vault and asked to picture five porticoes. It turned out to be the footing of a fifth-century church and Crusader work. In 1914, just before the war, Father Cré, a White Father, guessed from a rock-cut channel that a basin lay further south, and a sounding struck its corner. A rock-based wall about 6.5 meters wide parted it from the pool to the north.

The columns have been harder. The Dominican L.-H. Vincent computed a portico 8.47 meters high from a base and a pedestal that had crosses on it, and he called his drawing “volontairement un schéma,” a deliberate sketch, unsure of its details and sure of its plan. A German art historian gave the capitals to the fifth-century church. The Crusaders, for that matter, had built five low arcades at the corner of the pool, which makes them the first reconstructors. A double pool cut in the rock of the Bezetha valley was in use before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem; when each basin was cut is argued. Drums, bases and capitals came out of the rubble. Not one column was found in place, and their date is argued. Joachim Jeremias, whose book of 1949 made the site famous, said as much in a parenthesis.

Sir William Ramsay, after a lifetime on the roads of Asia Minor, put the case for Luke in a sentence: “Every person is found just where he ought to be.” The case has real stones behind it. Acts 17:6 calls the magistrates of Thessalonica by a title all but absent from surviving Greek literature, politarchs, which the World English Bible renders “the rulers of the city,” and inscriptions give dozens of instances of it, the best known from an arch at Thessalonica pulled down in 1876 “under the name of civic improvement.” Clermont-Ganneau found another in Jerusalem in 1871, a block of seven Greek lines, and he read it at once: “No stranger is to enter within the balustrade round the temple and enclosure. Whoever is caught will be responsible to himself for his death, which will ensue.” In Acts 21:28 a crowd cries out that Paul has “brought Greeks into the temple.” It is a notice of the kind Josephus describes, and neither of the two copies so far known was found in place.

A block from the theater at Caesarea names Pontius Pilate as prefect of Judea and a building called the Tiberieum, whatever that was. An Italian mission turned it up in 1961, reused as building stone in the theater itself. PILATVS stands whole on it, and the word prefect is a restoration that nobody contests. In a Jerusalem rescue dig in 1990 an ornate ossuary carried a family name read as Caiaphas, and many scholars think this is the high priest’s family tomb; the box never calls him priest.

Acts 18:12 brings Paul before Gallio at Corinth, and the date of that meeting can be followed link by link. At Delphi the French dug up pieces of a letter of the emperor Claudius, “horribly mutilated” in the words of Adolf Deissmann, the German scholar who made the case. It mentions Gallio, “my friend,” and part of the word for proconsul, and it dates itself by the number of times Claudius had been acclaimed as commander. The number twenty-six can be read. A stone at Kys in Asia Minor pairs that number with the twelfth year of his powers, which has to be restored at Delphi, and the next number, twenty-seven, stands on an arch of an aqueduct at Rome dedicated on 1 August AD 52. So the letter falls in the first seven months of 52, or just possibly late in 51. “Of Achaia” is not on the stone: Delphi’s place in Achaia and Acts supply it. That Gallio served one year, starting about midsummer, is an assumption, since no list of the proconsuls survives. Gallio was in Achaia about 51 or 52, and the dates of Paul’s journeys hang from that peg.

At Corinth, east of the theater, the American dig found a pavement with a man’s name let into it in bronze. The bronze is gone and only the sockets remain, and the slab with his first names is lost. What is left says that Erastus, or on one reading of the broken edge Eperastus, paved the place at his own expense in return for an aedileship, a city office, and Romans 16:23 sends greetings from “Erastus, the treasurer of the city.” The hinge is the pavement’s date. John Kent put it in the mid first century, which leaves the identification open; Steven Friesen argues for the second, which would end it, and calls the early date circular.

The same evidence runs both ways, and one scholar shows it. Emil Schürer, the German historian of the Jews in Jesus’s time and no friend to Luke on these points, read an inscription from Abila cut by a freedman of “Lysanias the tetrarch,” dated by its wording after AD 14, and conceded that Luke 3:1 “is thoroughly correct.” On the census of Luke 2:2 he left “absolutely no room for Quirinius” in the last years of Herod, and the stone from Tivoli usually offered against him has lost the name of the man it honors. In Acts 5:36 Gamaliel recalls Theudas as a rebel of the past, and Josephus knows one Theudas, who rose about AD 45, a decade after the speech. Nothing on the ground has resolved either case.

A find can carry a real place or a real office, a real person, and sometimes a date. No stone records a healing, a trial or a burial. Accuracy on what could be checked makes a narrator credible; it cannot verify what could not be checked.

In late 1968 a housing crew at Giv’at ha-Mivtar in north Jerusalem broke into some tombs. Vassilios Tzaferis, sent to look, found in one ossuary, a third full of syrupy fluid, the bones of a man and a child of three or four, and an inscription naming Yehohanan. He did not know how the man had died until the bones were examined. Nicu Haas, the first anatomist, reconstructed a seat, nailed forearms and legs broken by a blow, and much of the world repeated it. In 1985 two others took most of that away. What can be touched is one right heel, one bent nail 11.5 centimeters long, and traces of wood.

1956–2020 · Fixed by a receipt, and not by a court

The Court Would Not Say

A helicopter lifted an inscribed stele off the plateau at Serabit el-Khadim on 27 November 1956, three weeks after the fighting in Sinai stopped, on an operation that a pilot’s memoir lays to Moshe Dayan, then chief of staff of the Israeli army. An archaeologist of the Antiquities Authority later listed thirty-five sites of illegal digging by the general between 1951 and 1981. A landslide at Azor put him in the hospital for three weeks in 1968. After his death his widow sold most of the collection to the Israel Museum for $1,000,000, and no paper has been found behind the museum’s division of what he had bought from what he had dug.

The tunnel never gave the name of Hezekiah. About eight sealings of his have come from the market, none with a findspot, and one from the spade, sifted out of a dump at the Ophel in Jerusalem, which shows that such things are real and vouches for none of the others. Dan gave only the ending -yhw. The market has offered the Jehoash tablet, a dark stone with no findspot on which a king of that name orders repairs to the temple in whole sentences. Solomon’s temple has no outside witness. The market has offered an ivory pomegranate 44 millimeters high, which appeared in 1979 and which the Israel Museum bought in 1988, reportedly for $550,000, with a dedication to the temple of Yahweh on which only the last letter of the divine name survives. Excavated sealings in a burned house gave a match of names. Dealers have shown Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe, the Baruch of Jeremiah 36, on a sealing that surfaced in 1975. The tomb at Giv’at ha-Mivtar gave one heel. The market has offered a chalk box with no findspot, reading James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus. The best stories come from the market and the dull sherds come from the ground.

A draft thesis of 2025 reads the name of Moses in the old inscriptions at Serabit, on the plateau the helicopter left, and specialists have not accepted it. On Mount Ebal a folded scrap of lead sifted from the spoil was announced as a curse naming YHW. Epigraphers outside the team who have answered in print see no writing in the published scans.

The box and the tablet went to trial. On 14 March 2012, in the Jerusalem District Court, Judge Aharon Farkash gave a judgment of 475 pages after seven years, 126 witnesses, 120 sessions and over 12,000 pages of testimony. Oded Golan, the collector who owned them, was acquitted of forgery. The judge said the prosecution had not proved it, and added at once: “This is not to say that the inscription on the ossuary is true and authentic.” Yuval Goren, a Tel Aviv University petrologist on the Authority’s committee, had argued from a gray coating in the letters that the words were engraved “(or at least, completely cleaned)” in modern times, and his position moved under cross-examination. The judge said that police laboratory tests had probably contaminated the box, so that further tests were impossible. One thing the court did find fake, by the prosecutor’s account, was a decanter. The box is ancient. Whether the last words are is still argued, and the court would not say.

On the tablet, several leading epigraphers and the Antiquities Authority called it forged, on script, language and patina; others urged caution; a court declined to call it a forgery and declined to call it genuine. The pomegranate is an old pomegranate with, the museum now says, new words. The Berekhyahu sealings, once the most celebrated sealings in biblical archaeology, are now disputed; neither piece was excavated. Goren and Eran Arie of the Israel Museum compared them with more than 180 others and concluded that they were modern, and a rejoinder of 2016 argues that the case fails without claiming to prove them genuine. At a conference in 2007 one rare blessing on the Jehoash tablet, paralleled at Ekron, counted for one scholar in the tablet’s favor and for another as a forger reading the latest find.

In Washington the Museum of the Bible held sixteen fragments that its founder, Steve Green, had bought between 2009 and 2014, in four batches from four sellers. A report the museum itself paid for found all sixteen to be modern forgeries, inked on what is probably ancient leather, with the ink pooled in the cracks. One seller said he felt “kind of sick.” Seven had come from William Kando, son of the cobbler of 1947, who has denied that any he sold was false, and the sellers may themselves have been deceived. The hundred thousand genuine fragments from the caves are unaffected.

the best outcome for a fragment that surfaced after 2002 may be that it is fake, because a genuine one with no findspot would have been looted.

The third day · Fixed by Scripture

See the Place

For about sixty hours in October 2016 a bed of limestone lay open inside the Edicule, the shrine in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre that stands over the tomb held to be Jesus’s, while a team from the National Technical University of Athens, led by Antonia Moropoulou, had the marble off it. Mortar from between the bed and the slab above it was dated, as the press reported a year later, to about AD 345. The marble covering dates to Constantine’s generation, which fits what Eusebius says of the shrine. That is a date for a covering and not for a burial. Nothing on the rock says who lay there, and no test could. After about sixty hours the marble went back.

The stones are real, and the people who cut them had no reason to help the Bible. The stones have removed one kind of doubt, whether kings and towns and offices of the Bible were ever there, and they cannot touch the other.

The miners who heard each other through the last three cubits, the man who did not see Azekah, whoever wore the silver, Yedoniah waiting for an answer from the priests of Jerusalem and the man with a nail in his heel are in no verse of the Bible, and they lived beside those who are.

In the autumn of 2004 a water-company crew at the foot of the hill below the tunnel exposed the steps of a stepped pool, another basin from the one that visitors had been shown for centuries at the tunnel’s mouth. Coins of Alexander Jannaeus, a Jewish king of the first century BC, in the plaster give an earliest date and no more. It is a stepped pool in use in Jesus’s day, and it is still being dug, with no full report. John 9:7 says of the man sent to Siloam: “So he went away, washed, and came back seeing.”

The prepared place near the tunnel’s entrance is still there, with nothing written on it.

The spring still rises. The water goes through the hill in the dark, past the place where the words were, to the south end of the tunnel, from the source to the pool.

c. 1850 – today

The whole thing, in order

1. 1849Layard prints the black stone from Nimrud. Jehu’s payment is 841, by Shalmaneser’s annals and the list of officials.
2. 1853Layard publishes the Lachish room. The campaign is 701, by the annals.
3. 18 March 1854Rawlinson announces Belshazzar from the Ur cylinders, which say firstborn.
4. 1861The stone from Kurkh is found on the upper Tigris. Ahab at Qarqar is 853, by the list of officials.
5. 1862Rawlinson’s notes on the list of officials begin to appear. An eclipse in the month of Sivan gives 15 June 763, by an astronomer’s table.
6. December 1867Warren crawls the tunnel and passes the panel unseen.
7. 19 August 1868Klein sees the Mesha stone whole at Dhiban. Later ninth century, by the kings it names and its letters.
8. 1872Smith lectures on a Flood tablet copied in the seventh century BC. Clermont-Ganneau calls the Moabite pots false.
9. 14 May 1873Smith finds seventeen lines in a khan at Mosul. They belong to another poem.
10. June 1880A boy falls into the water at the south end of the tunnel and comes up facing the Siloam inscription. The decades around 700 BC, by its letters.
11. 1883Shapira’s strips are shown in London. No one living has seen them, and no test can now be run.
12. 1887The Amarna tablets come out of the bricks. The fourteenth century, by the kings they name.
13. April 1890Petrie reads the side of Tell el-Hesy. By October the Siloam panel has been cut out.
14. 1896Merneptah’s slab names Israel. About 1208, by Egypt’s reign lengths, counted back.
15. 1906Breasted publishes Karnak. About 925, from Kings, though Egypt reaches the same decade.
16. 1923Gadd publishes the chronicle that moves Nineveh from 606 to 612.
17. 1929Woolley’s book on Ur. No date for the Flood, from Ur or anywhere else.
18. 1930–36Garstang digs Jericho, looking for a date that comes from a verse: about 1446, by 1 Kings 6:1 read as a count.
19. 1935Sixteen written sherds come out of a burned room at Lachish. Before the last fire.
20. 1939Weidner publishes the oil lists. Early 591, by a scribe’s date on one tablet of four.
21. 1947Leather scrolls reach a cobbler in Bethlehem, with a story that was laughed at in 1883.
22. 1951Thiele publishes his reckoning. About 931 and 967, by the reigns of Kings counted back from 853.
23. 1952–58Kenyon at Jericho. The sixteenth century or a little before, on its grain.
24. 1953Tufnell moves a burned level at Lachish from 597 to 701.
25. 1956The chronicle of 597 is published, firm to the day, and it stops. The fall of Jerusalem has no tablet: 586, counted forward.
26. 1961A block at Caesarea names Pilate.
27. 1968A heel and a nail at Giv’at ha-Mivtar.
28. 1974–75Thompson and Van Seters take apart the patriarchal age. About 1876 for Abraham is reached by the 430 years, counted with Paul. Above it this page gives no date.
29. 1975–76Meshel digs Kuntillet Ajrud. Early in the eighth century, by pots and wood.
30. 1993–94Three pieces of a stele at Dan. Later ninth century, by letter forms, and by a city that fell about 733.
31. 1996Finkelstein proposes the Low Chronology.
32. 2004A water-company crew exposes the stepped pool at Siloam.
33. 14 March 2012The court in Jerusalem acquits Golan and will not say.
34. 2016The marble is lifted in the Edicule for about sixty hours. About AD 345, for the mortar.
35. 2020The Museum of the Bible reports on its sixteen fragments.
36. 2024Langlois argues that the pieces from Dan do not join. No reply has been found in print.
37. 2025Straw dates the dam below Siloam to about 800 BC, and a copy of Daniel gives two humps.
38. Next yearA headline, a stone and a date. Fixed by what?

Who says so

A note on sources

This is a secondhand history, built on the books and papers named below and on what could be read of the older editions, and where they disagree the disagreement has been left in the prose. Scripture is quoted from the World English Bible unless the sentence names another version. Old translations of inscriptions are quoted because they are free to quote, and several are out of date in ways the prose says.

Some of the work this page most needed could not be read. Michael Langlois’s article of 2024 on Tel Dan is known here only through one report and his own summary. Also out of reach were D. J. Wiseman’s edition of the chronicle, Weidner’s article, Torczyner’s edition, the editors’ report of 2004 on the Ketef Hinnom amulets, the books of Thompson and Van Seters, the judgment of the Jerusalem court in its Hebrew text, the recent French and American work on Bethesda, and the body of the 2003 paper on the tunnel, as distinct from its table. Thiele’s book is known here through Rodger Young’s account of it, and Dershowitz’s book through his article. The date of the Hazor destruction is given as Yadin gave it, and the latest report from that dig was seen only in its abstract. The Edicule’s mortar is known here through the press, and the team’s paper of 2018 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports was not reached. Where this page says that no reply has been found, it means that one was looked for and not found, and one may exist.

These came through the market and were not excavated, and they are named as what they are and used as evidence for nothing else: all but one of the sealings of Hezekiah named here, the Jehoash tablet, the ivory pomegranate, the Berekhyahu sealings, the James ossuary, Shapira’s strips, the Moabite pots and the fragments in Washington. The tablets of the town of Judah, the Amarna tablets and most of the Dead Sea Scrolls also came through the market, and they are used, for the reasons the text gives. The Mesha stone was not excavated either, but it was seen in place before it was broken, and a squeeze survives from before the fire.

Several readings are this page’s own and should be taken as such: that the cage in Sennacherib’s annals looks like a phrase for a king not taken, that the lines of DT 42 are those that stand unmarked in Smith’s translation, and that the list of firm dates near the start is a selection. The one running sum on this page uses one set of figures. Other figures can be defended, and the text says where.

The engravings are modern and imagined. They show places and what is missing from them, and none shows an inscription or records an object.

Further reading

• G. A. Cooke, A Text-Book of North-Semitic Inscriptions (1903) — Mesha, Siloam and the rest in one volume, with brackets a reader can follow. The first place to see what the stones say.
• S. R. Driver, Notes on the Hebrew Text and the Topography of the Books of Samuel (2nd ed., 1913) — The dots in line 31 are in the introduction.
• R. W. Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament (1912) — The eclipse, Kurkh, the black stone and Sennacherib in one old English, older than some of the readings it prints.
• George Smith, The Assyrian Eponym Canon (1875) — The list of officials, the eclipse, and the limits Smith set on his own proof.
• Daniel David Luckenbill, The Annals of Sennacherib (1924) — Free online. The Rassam Cylinder is now best read in the RINAP edition, also free online.
• Hallvard Hagelia, The Dan Debate (2009) — The history of the stele’s first fifteen years by the writer who tried to read everything.
• Michael Langlois, The Kings, the City and the House of David on the Mesha Stele (2019) — In Semitica 61. Line 31 letter by letter, by the man who reads it as house of David and calls that hypothetical.
• Rodger C. Young, When Did Solomon Die? (2003) — In the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 46/4, free online. Thiele’s five questions and his failure over Hezekiah, set out by a defender.
• A. R. Millard and D. J. Wiseman, editors, Essays on the Patriarchal Narratives (1980) — Believing scholars taking the patriarchal age apart and saving what they could. Selman’s chapter is the one to read.
• James Hoffmeier and Bryant Wood, Papers in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50/2 (2007) — The two dates for the exodus, argued against each other by their ablest defenders.
• Abigail Zammit, The Lachish Letters: A Reappraisal (2016) — An Oxford thesis, open online, and the fullest modern study of the sherds.
• Tero Alstola, Judeans in Babylonia (2020) — Open access. The oil lists, the town of Judah, and what cannot be known about where they came from.
• Idan Dershowitz, The Valediction of Moses: New Evidence on the Shapira Deuteronomy Fragments (2021) — In the Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 133. The case for the strips.
• Raz Kletter, A Very General Archaeologist (2003) — Dayan, in the open-access Journal of Hebrew Scriptures.
• Christopher Rollston and Heather Dana Davis Parker, Responses to the Epigraphic Forgery Crisis (2005) — The case for default doubt.

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