POOR WALL

When the rich build mighty walls to honor themselves, or their gods, or their God — and later the poor use those same walls for shelter — is it justice?

I think so, in a way. But it’s the wrong question to ask on this expedition.

Archaeologists are scientists, you see. They deal in fact. But I’m no archaeologist. I’m just a dirt hog who keeps showing up season after season.

So maybe I can write about poor walls.

We’re digging at Hippos, a remarkable city founded in the fourth century BCE. It persisted a thousand years until a great earthquake destroyed it about 748 CE.

No one rebuilt Hippos thereafter. Too remote to rob of stones, high atop a 1,000-meter mountain overlooking the Sea of Galilee, Hippos has become an archaeological treasure — mostly still all there.

But the great day of wrath wasn’t the last day for Hippos. People lived here afterwards. And they built poor walls.


FUSSBUDGET

Here I work with Mark Schuler, a theologian from Concordia University in St. Paul, Minn., and an assistant dig director at Hippos.

Mark is an exacting scholar, meticulous excavator, caring pastor — and a real fussbudget about walls.

Our little team has been digging in an area just west of what we call North East Church, where we have excavated since 2002. Anchoring a complex of buildings that may be an urban monastery, the church proper dates to at least the seventh century, probably earlier. It has burials. Fascinating place.

This season we’re likely on the outer periphery of the complex, perhaps in a domestic area where monks may have lived.

So it’s important. And I’ve never seen Mark think so hard as he did this past week. He was puzzling over a wall — or destruction fill. We couldn’t tell which.

Finally he took a pick to it. After a few swings he stopped. “I feel as though I’m taking apart a wall,” he muttered to himself.

“Better you than us,” I said. I was trying to be funny.


DIRT FLYING

Next day I was in a hole not quite two meters deep that we excavated last season. I was working slowly through the balk toward where a corner should be. We had one face of a wall in the next square beyond the meter-wide balk. My side of the wall had to be in there.

I picked at it gently, handing up football-size rocks and buckets of soil to other workers who hauled away the fill in the gathering morning heat.

I like this work. Some days you bust your tail yanking out massive stones and buckets of dust. Other days you slow down, working expectantly. I was finding a lot of pottery shards — which tend to be in corners. You find remarkable things in corners.

But our putative wall still looked like rubble. About 8:30 a.m. I left for breakfast.

When I came back I found Mark in my hole, dirt flying. In the changing light he had seen the line of his wall and gone after it.

This wall turned out to be a poor wall built atop the earlier construction, “floating” on a layer of soil that already covered the earlier ruins. Hence our difficulty in distinguishing it.

To real archaeologists, poor walls are nuisances. But I like them. They show that people lived here even after the great day of wrath, the earthquake that destroyed the city. A family had built this wall out of rocks lying about nearby in the dead city, probably to pen up livestock.


UNWITTING RE-ENACTORS

That’s why I dig — to come to know the people who once lived here. Some days I can almost see them, tending their sheep, preparing food, hurrying along the abandoned main street — the decumanus — or coming down the cardo past the ruins of our long-empty church.

It’s a strange business, archaeology. Supposedly passionless excavators are really dreamers, are they not? They’re trying to resurrect the dead.

Sometimes they become unwitting re-enactors: At the North West Church 100 meters away, Julia Burdajewicz and Anna Knapek of the Polish team screen soil against the indescribable azure backdrop of the Sea of Galilee. They might be winnowing grain. Emilia Jastrzebska muscling a bucket from the cistern might be drawing water, not earth.

But today is today. A young man, their friend and colleague, is down in the cistern troweling for artifacts. Julia and Emilia joke about whether to leave him there for the weekend.

Did the shepherd’s family laugh as well? A great, rich, dead city? Why build a wall when the ancients have already done so for us? Let us add our poor wall and it will be enough.

I ask Arthur Segal of Haifa University, our dig director, what surprises him about Hippos in his eighth season here.

He says it is the affluence of the place in classical times: Five hundred granite columns imported from Egypt — this was not government spending. Private citizens paid. We have an inscription about one couple who did so. It’s their buildings we want to find, not the poor walls.

Yet after the rich were gone, the poor walls went up: ordinary people making a living in the city of the dead.

So I like finding poor walls. Any family today could make one with a little hard work and cooperation — and without expensive Byzantine architects or stone masons.

These capable post-destruction people knew how to survive. They never stopped trying. They made do. And, as Jesus said, we will always have them with us. Let us pay attention. We can learn from them.

THE ONLY BIBLE CAPITAL?

Of the seven biblical kingdoms between the Euphrates and Egypt, says Rami Arav, we have only one capital thoroughly excavated — at Bethsaida.

Arav calls his Iron Age city the largest and best preserved capital from that period of the ancient Near East.

Arav, who teaches at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, is co-director of the dig with Richard A. Freund of the University of Hartford (Conn.)

Arav names the Bethsaida Iron Age city Zer — believing Joshua 19:35 refers to the site just north of the Sea of Galilee on which Arav has spent 20 years.

Capitals of the other Iron Age kingdoms in the Bible are less thoroughly studied, Arav claims:

o Damascus in Syria, Amman in Jordan and Jerusalem in Israel have all been continuously occupied and aren’t fully accessible to archaeology.

o Samaria of the Northern Kingdom was partly excavated in the 1930s and — now in the occupied West Bank — is difficult to work further.

o Tyre of the Phoenicians was partly destroyed by Alexander the Great but never abandoned.

o Dibon of the Moabites? Arav believes excavations at modern Dhiban, Jordan, are inconclusive about whether it is the correct site.

When he started digging at Bethsaida, some scholars wondered whether there ever was a kingdom of Geshur. But Arav is convinced he has its capital — everything a king needs.


NOTHING BUT MONUMENTAL

From the city’s Iron Age, says Arav, “we have never seen anything but monumental and we have been digging for 20 years. We have a palace. We have a monumental gate. We have storages. That’s what constitute a capital city, in my mind.”


The complex at Bethsaida is best known for its massive four-chamber gate, which Arav says by area is the largest gate complex in the ancient Near East — half an acre if you include the outer marketplace. The adjacent palace overlooks the approach, where merchants must have sold goods and where the king’s subjects must have come to buy and sell, to appeal to the city’s elders in judicial matters, and to worship where priests sacrificed on one of the five “high places” within the complex.

The Bible mentions gates more than 1,000 times, says Arav. “The city gate is the heart and soul of the city,” he adds. “The most important function of the city is the city gate.”

Arav thinks Bethsaida was important enough to be the capital of the kingdom of Gerush from which David of Israel took a wife, Ma’achah.

If he’s right, that would mean Absalom — son of David and Ma’achah — probably fled to this city after ordering the death of his brother Amnon for Amnon’s rape of Absalom’s sister Tamar (2 Samuel 13).

But Absalom would have entered through the 10th century gate, not the one through which visitors walk today. Arav and his crew are probing below the monumental ninth-century gate for clues about its predecessor.

They won’t remove the big gate, however. “I think I would lose all my students today,” Arav quips from a plastic patio chair in the shade amid the stony rubble of centuries. “It’s a huge undertaking. It’s also a landmark.”


WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE?

The gate complex proper is 525 square meters, a quarter acre, not counting the exterior marketplace. The gate’s chambers include grain-storage areas — excavators found the carbonized kernels.

Also in the complex were seven stelae, one depicting a bull god — perhaps Hadad — evidently broken in five pieces by the conquering Assyrians. It is now in the Israel Museum.

What bothers Arav about his monumental capital is that he can’t find its people. “Where might be the domestic quarter?” he muses from his plastic patio chair amid the ruins.

He may yet find it in the city proper — or perhaps the city was only for the king, his family, his entourage, his guards and the priests, while subjects lived in villages around the city.

When the Assyrians invaded, these subjects would have fled behind the gate — in vain. About 732 BCE, Tiglath-Pileser III destroyed the city.

It lay desolate until Tyrean colonists arrived in the third century BCE. They grew flax to weave into linen for dying in Tyre, Arav surmises. His crew has found loom weights and flax pollen where flax is absent now.

In 100 BCE the Hasmonean Jewish dynasty took the city. Again it was abandoned. Arav believes the Jews gave the Tyreans the choice given the conquered Idumeans further south at about the same time — convert or depart. The Idumeans, surrounded by desert, submitted to circumcision. The Tyrean colonists had another choice, guesses Arav. They left for Tyre.

Thereafter Bethsaida, once the proud capital of a mighty kingdom, became a modest fishing village. The Romans gave the territory to Herod the Great, expecting him to protect international trade routes against Bedouin raiders.


PUNY WALL

Around the time of Jesus, it was a large village. Herod’s son Philip honored it by making Bethsaida a polis in about 30 CE. For show, Philip added a 1.5-meter-thick wall — puny in comparison to the massive six-meter-wide Iron Age fortification.

The New Testament suggests Jesus preached and healed in the village-polis, and disciples Peter, Andrew and Philip were from there.

It persisted as a fishing village until the third century CE, says Arav, when one or more earthquakes altered the course of the Jordan, silting up lagoons and eventually leaving the village more than a kilometer from the Sea of Galilee.


LEAVING A LEGACY

Other digs’ seasons continue, but for Arav and his colleagues at Bethsaida the season ends this week. Over the years, Bethsaida’s season has gradually shortened from 12 weeks to six. Why? “Because I’m getting old,” sighs Arav, who will turn 60 in October.

Do the end of the season and the landmark birthday enhance the importance of Bethsaida for him?

Arav is working with a park planner to make the rough-and-tumble site more accessible to visitors. “Every human being wants to leave a legacy,” he says. “Think about Knossos and Evans. Think about Schliemann and Troy.”

In other words, Arav is thinking big, even monumentally — like his mysterious city at Bethsaida.

TEL DOR: NEW ANSWERS, NEW MYSTERIES AND STILL DIGGING

When Elizabeth Bloch-Smith reached the floor in a monumental seafront Phoenician building that was strangely bare of artifacts indicating the structure’s use — it wasn’t the end of a maddening story.

That’s what Bloch-Smith loves about Tel Dor and its collaboration with the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Weizmann Institute is a multidisciplinary research organization in Rehovot, Israel, noted for its wide-ranging scientific inquiry.

Tel Dor? It was a key port from the Iron Age to late Roman times, finally diminishing in importance about 250 CE — by which time the port of Caesarea Maritima just six miles south along the Mediterranean coast had probably taken over much of its shipping.

The collaboration between excavation and Weizmann enhances the importance of Tel Dor, dug since 1980 except for two seasons.

Tel Dor now is well enough understood that archaeologists turn to it seeking help — for example, to identify cargos of Phoenician shipwrecks as far away as Spain.

“Our particular importance is first the sea,” says Ilan Sharon, Tel Dor’s dig director. “We’re a port town. Number 2 is that we are a site that’s both biblical and classical.”


MOTLEY CREW


But now Tel Dor is much more as well. The Weizmann collaboration means that Sharon and his team work with physicists, chemists, biologists and geologists — as well as the usual biblical scholars and classicists studying Hellenistic and Roman periods.

Sharon has some fun with that. “Sometimes ironically it’s easier to work with physicists than to work with classicists,” quips the University of Haifa Iron Age specialist. “But we manage.”

The prospect of fruitful exchanges among this motley crew is what excites Sharon about his dig. A long-term project such as Tel Dor lends itself to cross-disciplinary study — if you keep it going. “You need 10 to 15 years to even learn your site,” explains Sharon, who has worked at Tel Dor since the beginning of the excavation. “Most projects at this point — they finish. We at this point decided that that’s where the real beginning is.”

Now Sharon is in a position to field research requests that will buttress the full field of archaeology. Say you want to test carbon-dating accuracy with samples from Late Iron, Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods. Sharon can quickly show you exactly where to scrape up that organic material at Tel Dor.

The dig continued at Dor until 2000, the first year for biblical scholar Bloch-Smith. After a two-year hiatus, excavation resumed in 2003. In that year excavators began the collaboration with scientists from Weizmann. The payoff was prompt. Excavators were stumped by the empty monumental building in the Phoenician style overlooking the harbor at Dor, dating to between 1100 and 900 BCE.

The building was utterly bare of artifacts indicating its use. “We had no information in the forms that archaeologists normally collect,” says Bloch-Smith. Enter the Weizmann scientists. “Through their scientific analysis,” says Bloch-Smith, “they were able to give us new information.”

On the floor of the building, the Weizmann collaborators found microscopic fish bones. That still leaves Bloch-Smith without any idea of the building’s function — but it’s a vital clue.

Another example from the 2003 season: Weizmann scientists analyzed various levels from an unspectacular sequence of grey-white ash/plaster floors in a room at Tel Dor.

Only one level actually turned out to be plaster floor. A second was infused with stalks from one kind of grass. “It was probably a woven mat,” says Bloch-Smith, “which we would never have gotten archaeologically.”

A third floor turned out to be dung ash — likely from kitchen cooking. The uppermost ash/plaster floor was all unburned animal dung, suggesting the building may have been last used as a stable.

“So all these surfaces which to the eye looked similar and we would call ash/plaster,” says Bloch-Smith, “turned out to be completely different surfaces.”


POOP SNOOPING

The Weizmann collaborators can’t always help. Bloch-Smith asked a Weizmann biologist whether dung analysis could show what kind of animals were present. Sorry. Poop snooping hasn’t reached that level of sophistication.

Dor is mentioned in the Bible without playing a key role. Its king Ben-Abinadab married Taphath daughter of Solomon. As the southernmost Phoenician city, the town elsewhere in the Bible is a border marker. The construction style of the Iron Age site is Phoenician with Philistine elements — “clearly a cosmopolitan coastal culture,” says Bloch-Smith.

Excavators at the site work in a gorgeous seafront setting in full view of the beach at the resort where they stay.

If she and Sharon can keep their workers’ minds off sun and sea, Bloch-Smith will be coming down to a level which in an adjacent square showed massive sandstone surfaces over the entire area, many with significant sloping, and “an odd ashlar here and there,” she says.

“It’s one of these enigmatic subphases. So you start generating questions. You ask the Weizmann people to look at some of these surfaces.”

At least one sequence is clear: Bloch-Smith traces the success of the cross-disciplinary approach directly to Sharon. “He’s mathematical and scientific,” says Bloch-Smith. “He’s the one who’s making these overtures.”

Sharon himself anticipates a quiet season at Tel Dor. You know what that means. Stay tuned.