“In name, which reflects that of the tribe of Gad, and in appearance, he could have been one of the Israelite chieftains who had journeyed with Moses and the children of Israel,” Glueck wrote in his book about the adventure, Rivers in the Desert.
Glueck’s guide was a local Bedouin chief, Sheikh Audeh ibn Jad, who struck the American archaeologist as a nearly biblical figure. Glueck’s expedition had been riding for 11 days, surveying the wastes between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. In the 1960s, he would be on the cover of Time magazine and, as a rabbi, deliver the benediction at John F. The leader of the expedition was Nelson Glueck, an archaeologist from Cincinnati, Ohio, later renowned as a man of both science and religion. At the time, the country was ruled by the British. On the afternoon of March 30, 1934, a dozen men stopped their camels and camped in the Arava Desert. Far from any city, ancient or modern, Timna is illuminating the time of the Hebrew Bible-and showing just how much can be found in a place that seems, at first glance, like nowhere. The ongoing excavation is now one of the most fascinating in a country renowned for its archaeology. Such organic artifacts have led researchers to revise the site’s date to the time of King Solomon.īut when Ben-Yosef got the results back from Oxford they showed something else-and so began the latest revolution in the story of Timna. So his findings have been a surprise even to him.Ĭharcoal from smelting furnaces at Timna. This conclusion was so firmly established that the local tourism board, in an attempt to draw visitors to this remote location, had put up kitschy statues in “walk like an Egyptian” poses.Įrez Ben-Yosef, who leads the Timna excavation, is a self-described agnostic when it comes to biblical history. The site had already been conclusively dated by an earlier expedition that had uncovered the ruins of a temple dedicated to an Egyptian goddess, linking the site to the empire of the pharaohs, the great power to the south. They began to extract pieces of organic material-charcoal, a few seeds, 11 items all told-and dispatched them to a lab at Oxford University for carbon-14 dating. With that in mind, Ben-Yosef and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego unpacked their shovels and brushes at the foot of a sandstone cliff and started digging. His field was paleomagnetism, the investigation of changes in the earth’s magnetic field over time, and specifically the mysterious “spike” of the tenth century B.C., when magnetism leapt higher than at any time in history for reasons that are not entirely understood.
It was the kind of place unimportant enough to be entrusted to someone with fresh credentials and no experience leading a dig.Īt the time, Ben-Yosef wasn’t interested in the Bible.
It wasn’t the Jerusalem of Jesus, or the famous citadel of Masada, where Jewish rebels committed suicide rather than surrender to Rome. The site wasn’t on Israel’s archaeological A-list, or even its B-list. When the Israeli archaeologist Erez Ben-Yosef arrived at the ancient copper mines of Timna, in 2009, he was 30 years old. Egyptian temple at the base of the cliffs upended historians’ understanding of the site. This article is a selection from the December issue of Smithsonian magazine BuyĪ rock formation known as Solomon’s Pillars. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12