A mysterious First Temple-era archaeological
find under a Palestinian orchard near Bethlehem is increasingly gaining
attention — despite attempts to keep it quiet.
In February, a tour guide leading a group
through an underground tunnel in the rural West Bank, not far from
Jerusalem, was surprised to stumble upon the remains of a unique carved
pillar.
The pillar matched monumental construction
from the 9th or 8th centuries BCE — the time of the First Temple in
Jerusalem. That signaled the presence of an important and previously
unknown structure from that period.
Buried under earth and rubble, the pillar was now two yards below the surface.
The guide, Binyamin Tropper, notified
antiquities officials. He was surprised when they encouraged him to
leave the subject and the site alone, said Tropper, who works at an
educational field school at Kibbutz Kfar Etzion.
“They told me — we know about it, keep it quiet,” he said.
The remains are in the politically charged
West Bank, on the outskirts of an Arab village and on land privately
owned by a Palestinian — all reasons the Israeli government might deem
attempting an excavation there a major political headache to be avoided.
When it became clear that antiquities
officials did not intend to excavate what he believed to be a
potentially huge find, Tropper went to the Hebrew press, where several
reports have appeared on inside pages in recent weeks.
Tropper has kept the location secret to avoid attracting the attention of antiquities thieves.
Early this month, several prominent Israeli
archaeologists were brought to inspect the site. Among them was Yosef
Garfinkel, an archaeology professor from Hebrew University.
There is no doubt the remains are those of monumental construction from the time of the First Temple, Garfinkel said.
The top of the pillar, known as a capital, is
of a type known as proto-aeolic, he said. That style dates to around
2,800 years ago.
The pillar marks the entrance to a carved
water tunnel reaching 250 yards underground, he said, complex
construction that would almost certainly have been carried out by a
central government. At the time, the area was ruled by Judean kings in
nearby Jerusalem.
In its scale and workmanship, Garfinkel said,
the tunnel evokes another grand water project of First Temple times —
the Siloam Tunnel in Jerusalem, now underneath the modern-day Arab
neighborhood of Silwan. That project is believed to have been undertaken
by the biblical king Hezekiah to channel water into the city ahead of
an Assyrian siege in the 8th century BCE, according to an account in the
biblical Book of Kings.
The existence of a large water tunnel at the new site suggests the presence nearby of a large farm or palace, Garfinkel said.
“The construction is first-rate,” he said.
“There is definitely something important there from biblical times, the
9th or 8th centuries BCE.”
Archaeology in the Holy Land has long been
caught up in modern-day politics. The Zionist movement always viewed
unearthing remnants of the ancient past as a way of proving the depth of
Jewish roots in the land. Palestinians, for their part, have
increasingly taken to denying the existence of any ancient Jewish
history and tend to condemn all archaeology conducted by Israel as an
attempt to cement political control.