Posted on 04/07/2014 7:21:44 AM PDT by NYer
A massive 3,800-year-old fortress that protected the Gihon Spring was uncovered in the City of David. Photo: Eli Mandelbaum, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.Excavations around the Gihon Spring in the City of David have uncovered a massive 3,800-year-old fortress. Called the “Spring Citadel” by archaeologists, the discovery is part of a 15-year excavation led by Professor Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukrun of the Israel Antiquities Authority.
This enormous 18th-century B.C.E. structure that isolates and protects the Gihon Spring is believed to be the fortress described in the Book of Samuel that King David conquered:
According to Oriya Dasberg, director of development in the City of David, “The Spring Citadel was built in order to save and protect the water of the city from enemies coming to conquer it, as well as to protect the people going down to the spring to get water and bring it back up to the city.”
With 23-foot-thick walls comprised of stone blocks up to ten feet wide, the Spring Citadel represents the largest Canaanite fortress discovered thus far in Israel.
Read more about the Canaanite fortress uncovered at the Gihon Spring.
FYI Ping!
Ping!
Isn’t Mad Mo’ really the direct descendent of the Canaanite Kings?
I found this link about King David’s tomb which I think is even more interesting than the fortress.
It has lots of good drawings of the arecheological dig and pictures as well. Might be good for its own posting on GGG.
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It doesn’t seem to have been posted, so, anyway, thanks, good idea!
https://www.google.com/search?q=King+David’s+Tomb+site%3Afreerepublic.com
Isn’t Gihon one of the four rivers that flowed in the Garden of Eden?
It’s an article about a Biblical story but they use CE and BCE. I don’t understand this big aversion to using BC and AD, after all, what happened at that time to change the calendar?
You know of course that there have been some scholars—and enemies of the State of Israel—who have denied the very existence of King David/Solomon and all those chapters of the Bible, saying they were simply myths.
But it seems like the more recent excavations keep turning up circumstantial evidence. I remember some dig turned up a seal of a bureaucrat in the service of a later minor king that referred to the House of David. Another dig is working on what may be David’s palace.
So much of Jewish history as told in in the Bible is related in some way to the reality of David. The Messiah was supposed to come from the Davidian line for example.
So the discovery of what could be tombs in exactly the right location described in the Bible could be one more brick in the wall of circumstantial evidence that the Bible actually records real events and people.
Quibble, an artifact isn’t circumstantial evidence, it’s direct evidence. But you’re 100 percent spot on, there are useless idiots in Israel who deny that there was ever a kingdom period, or much of anything else. My view is, they shouldn’t be in the positions where they find themselves, and there must be some political reason that they are. Once the latter is addressed, it’ll be much easier for something to be done about the academic fakery.
http://www.varchive.org/ce/theses.htm
http://www.kjvbible.org/rivers_of_the_garden_of_eden.html
the 4 rivers of Eden. It gets real interesting about halfway down the page at the link, and this theory tends to place Eden not in Iraq, but within Israel’s biblical jurisdiction.
Was the fortress defended by a crack team of the blind and the lame? Did they find any white canes?
Careful. Someone's going to call you a "Protestant."
I suppose the secularists are concerned that if it's right about the history, it just might be right about other things too . . .
The description of those four rivers don’t really fit the geography and has always been a little frustrating — all flow out of Eden, but one surrounds Ethiopia (in Africa, south of Egypt), another is east of Assyria, one surrounds Havilah, and the other is the Euphrates which is sill there. If we look to the source of the Euphrates, it is nowhere near the source of, say, the Blue Nile which flows out of Ethiopia (which is more or less bordered by the White Nile).
This has an interesting discussion of this issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havilah
sidebars:
http://www.varchive.org/ce/baalbek/eden.htm
http://www.varchive.org/itb/rift.htm
I wholeheartedly agree. The stuff in the OT that is frankly historical, such as rulers, battles, fall of cities, would be obvious places to start in building synchronisms with ancient contemporary chronicles.
That has worked best with the Assyrian timeline, and to some extent the Babylonian, but most of the events in any one source pertain to the local stuff, or in the case of the wide-ranging Assyrians, to yet another place in some other direction and sometimes at great distances.
During the 19th century there began systematic and systemic efforts to undermine the Divine Right of Kings, and of course the most direct way to do that was to drop-kick the Bible. At best, that’s a baby-with-the-bath-water move. The other impediment to finding accurate synchronisms was the screwy things that were done vis a vis the chronology (or as I like to call it, pseudochronology) of the Egyptian New Kingdom, which has been a neck anchor for the ancient history of the eastern Mediterranean in general.
The synchronism problems were more than 90 percent solved in 1945:
http://www.varchive.org/ce/theses.htm
sidebars:
http://www.varchive.org/ce/joseph.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/hammurabi.html
Here’s what is nuts to me. The majority of the stories in the Old Testament aren’t especially religious. Many of them are simply historical tales of kings, battles, enemies and the wanderings of a Middle Eastern tribe.
The skeptics and secularists worry that if a proof of David slaying Goliath could be proved, for example, that it would also mean that the religious theme of the chosen people with a special relationship to a one true God would also be proved.
It’s pretty easy to see how a series of plagues and an escape from Egypt, the most powerful nation on earth, could be interpreted by the Jews as divine intervention on their behalf. But there are explanations for the plagues which have nothing to do with the supernatural and the exodus could simply be a great escape through dangerous but knowable terrain.
New Testament stories are much more religious in tone and meaning, requiring faith for their acceptance.
But there are explanations for the plagues which have nothing to do with the supernatural and the exodus could simply be a great escape through dangerous but knowable terrain.
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