What can fossilized donkey dung tell us about the reach of King Solomon’s rule in the 10th century B.C.?
The Bible depicts Solomon as a rich, wise and powerful king, ruling over a unified Israelite kingdom.
For centuries, skeptics and “minimalists” said Solomon’s kingdom was small and inconsequential.
Then copper mines were discovered in the Timna Valley in the far south of Israel.
Copper mines are a potential source of wealth and international trade.
But who had control of these mines?
The skeptics and minimalists offered a plausible answer: Egypt! Egypt was the great power in the Near East in the 10th century B.C.
But donkey dung found in the area sent archaeologists, led by Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University, in a different direction.
The dung was surprisingly well-preserved, and there was also a large amount of it.
Scholars analyzed the seeds and pollen in the dung, and could tell from its ingredients that the donkey was raised in or near Jerusalem.
How could they possibly know that? Because evidently the donkey’s diet consisted of vegetation characteristic of Jerusalem.
A single donkey. A single deposit of donkey poop. Yet the implications are quite profound.
The presence of dung at the copper site, from a Jerusalem donkey, suggests that Jerusalem controlled the mines, not Egypt.
The copper mines were most likely part of Solomon’s kingdom.
And the donkey dung offered a clue not just to the affluence of that kingdom, but also to its reach, far south of Jerusalem to the bottom tip of Israel.
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A gang of goons, acting on the authority of King Zedekiah of Judah, threw the prophet Jeremiah into a pit.
Two of them were Jehucal son of Shelemiah and Gedaliah son of Pashur.
Both men have been historically corroborated through the archaeological discovery of clay seal impressions dated to the sixth century B.C. bearing their names.
And that’s me, below, in the actual pit into which Jeremiah was tossed. Debbie my wife took his short video of me in Jerusalem earlier this year.
But how did Jeremiah survive?
“Now when Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, one of the eunuchs of the king’s house, heard that they had put Jeremiah in the dungeon…” (Jeremiah 38:7)
So the king’s own men put Jeremiah in there, but a low-ranking Ethiopian decided to take matters into his own hands.
Ebed-melech approached the king—a daunting task that involved great personal risk—and remarkably got permission to get Jeremiah out.
It took 30 men to pull Jeremiah out since he was trapped in the caked mud at the ...
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My PragerU documentary, covering the full sweep of biblical history, broken up here into 12 episodes of roughly 10 minutes each. Enjoy!
https://www.prageru.com/videos/the-stones-cry-out-episode-1-introduction
The Bible says King Solomon built fortifications in 4 cities: Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer.
Such fortifications were accompanied by a city gate. Such gates were used for defensive purposes but also for ritualistic ceremonies and juridical practices.
City elders sat in judgement at the gates and also heard the pleas of the poor and needy there.
In recent decades, archaeologists discovered fortifications and six-chambered city gates at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer.
The eminent Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin recognized the fortifications and gates were all constructed in the same way and date to the same period—the period of Solomon.
Yadin argued the archaeological evidence supported the biblical record.
But what about the Jerusalem gate? In 1986 archaeologists Eilat Mazar and her grandfather Benjamin Mazar uncovered a fourth parallel gate structure in Jerusalem.
See below a photograph of the late Eilat Mazar, who spent her distinguished career at Hebrew Univeristy, in front of that ...
The passage from Josephus is well-known; the issue is its authenticity.
Skeptics have long insisted Josephus’s account of Jesus was altered by later Christian authors.
Now it seems it was genuine.
Another blow for the “armchair skeptics” who are not having a good day, a good year, or even a good century.
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