The invaders never took this city. It remained a thriving, exotic center of Canaanite civilization — a snapshot of the wealth and organization of the culture into which biblical leader Joshua led the Israelites.
And so today Amihai Mazar is a busy man — leading tours, doing his own photography, mediating a dispute among his workers about whether soil in a square washed in during the winter or is part of the archaeological context.
“Everywhere I go,” he sighs, “there is a problem for me to solve.”
That means the Hebrew University scholar has a terrific excavation underway. It’s Tel Rehov, a Canaanite center in the Jordan Valley five kilometers south of Beth Shean.
The 10-hectare Tel Rehov where Mazar has excavated since 1997 rises from surrounding agricultural fields. It yields a wealth of information about the 12th through eighth centuries BCE.
CANAANITE HEARTLAND
The Bible doesn’t mention Rehov, but we know it from Egyptian documents. It was a center of the chariot-building industry in the late 13th century — a key city-state with a local king.
“This was a thriving, important city, which is not the case in many other mounds in this country where there were gaps between the Canaanite period, the late Bronze Age and the Iron Age,” says Mazar. “Here we have no gap — just continuity.”
In its lush agricultural valley near vital trade routes, Rehov grew rich — and the Israelite invasion never touched it. “This was the heartland of the Canaanite civilization,” says Mazar, “and the Israelites even according to the Bible didn’t manage to conquer, to settle, in this area.”Continuity is the site’s great feature at this point. “The city,” says Mazar, “was built and rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt consistently.”
Mazar and his diggers have found a long continuous sequence from the Late Bronze into the early Iron Age, without any gaps. For centuries, the city didn’t suffer invasion or abandonment.
The long period of tranquility means some buildings are empty of artifacts. “When people have luck, a chance to leave the building and go away, we archaeologists suffer,” he tells a tour group, pointing to an example. “Here the floors were empty of finds.”
The Tel Rehov sequence is complete enough that it provides a valuable calibration for hotly debated dates for the Bronze and Iron ages.
Rehov’s relationship to Megiddo about 50 kilometers west in the Jezreel is clear: The assemblage of pottery in Rehov’s Strata V–IV is identical with the pottery mix in Megiddo’s Strata VB and VB–IVA, according to a Rehov excavation report.
MUD BRICK — AND WOOD
Mazar has a well-organized, carefully designed city consistent in its design. “It appears to be a large city all built in the same style,” says Mazar, “which is very unusual. You don’t find such constructions anywhere else in this country.”
Some of its buildings were of an extraordinary mud-brick construction, without any stone even for foundation. In fact, some structures had wood foundations and in one case even a wood floor below beaten earth.
About half the wood was olive, the rest from other local Jordan River valley trees, says Mazar.
Long before Joshua, Rehov and other Bronze Age cities went without fortifications for a period of about 300 years — perhaps at the insistence of then-dominant Egypt.
In one area, Mazar has excavated to the very western foot of the tell — exposing an 11th century building bounded by a street — and no fortification. “I thought we should find city walls,” says Mazar. “Nothing.”
He did find a surprise in 2003, however: Beehives. Microanalysis showed that mysterious small structures were lined with beeswax. Mazar believes beekeepers harvested the honey and the wax, which was used for medical purposes and also in casting small metal pieces.
The centuries without invasion came to an end eventually. Rehov encountered violent episodes twice within a few generations.
One great conflagration dates to sometime between 934–894 BCE. Another destruction happened between 877–840 BCE. Some of the devastation may stem from the raid of Shoshenq I of Egypt (1 Kings 11:40 and 14:25; 2 Chronicles 12:2), say the excavation report.
In the destruction at Rehov, excavators found a “cultic corner” — a pottery altar or “cult stand,” a painted “petal” chalice and a number of chalices and bowls. Another room yielded a shrine decorated with a “bull or feline figure” holding two human heads in its claws.
The Israelite desert tribes must have been awestruck by the wealth of such places as Rehov. No wonder they sometimes strayed from worshiping their fierce deity alone.
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