Biblical Hebrew Blog by ClassicalHebrew.com

The city of Lachish, located in the maritime lowlands of Judea, is first mentioned in the Bible during Joshua’s conquest. After the Gibeonites deceptively made a covenant with Joshua, many of the Canaanite kings were alarmed that they might be conquered with Gibeonite assistance, and therefore set out to fight the Gibeonites. Joshua took over all of these rebellious cities, and Lachish, being one of them, was later part of the territory assigned to the tribe of Judah.

Lachish, located on an important cross-roads between the coast and Hebron, became a major city in the Judean kingdom during the reign of Rehoboam, and was conquered by the Assyrians in the time of Hezekiah (in 701 BCE), when it became the Assyrian local headquarters. Due to the fact that the Assyrians failed to conquer Jerusalem, it was Lachish that was depicted as the main Judean city overcome during the Assyrian invasion and carved reliefs describing its destruction were placed in the central room of Sennacherib’s new palace in Nineveh.

The archaeological findings from Lachish are extensive and include a temple, inscriptions and more from the Canaanite period, and an impressive fortress which should probably be dated to the Israelite period. Many ostraca, stamps and weights containing Hebrew writing that probably should be dated to a period after the destruction by the Assyrians when the city was re-inhabited teach us of the every-day life there.

Most famous among the archaeological finds are the “Lachish Letters.” In these letters, which were written on re-cycled pieces of broken earthenware pottery (known as “ostraca”) we find an extensive correspondence between an outpost in the vicinity of Lachish and the Lachish military headquarters. The letters were all written within a few days, and deal with a book (meaning, a letter) which was read by someone unauthorized to do so or possibly was misread and misunderstood. These letters also mention a military delegation sent to Egypt and other information. Based on archaeological data, the letters are apparently from the eve of the Babylonian destruction, and therefore can be connected to the Babylonian conquest of Judea and the siege over the few remaining cities – Jerusalem, Lachish and Azeka.
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The oldest part of Israelite Jerusalem, known as the city of David, is located on a narrow ridge just south of the walls of the current old city of Jerusalem. After conquering Jerusalem from the Jebusites, David established the city as his capital and began to develop it. David’s Jerusalem was extremely small and was populated mainly by the king and his staff. David laid the groundwork for building a royal Acropolis, including a palace, administrative building, and naturally, the Jerusalem temple. It was his son, Solomon, who completed this building project, as well as the wall of the city, which was not completed by David: “Solomon built the Milo and closed the breaches [in the walls] of the city of his father David” (1 Kings 11:27).

The city of David has undergone massive excavations since the 19^th century, revealing public buildings, private houses, water systems and other archaeological findings. These excavations also reveal the slow expansion the city underwent and its extension towards the eastern hills of the area.

Of special importance among the archaeological finds is an ancient water system which enabled the inhabitants of Canaanite Jerusalem to reach a protected accumulation pool outside the city walls using an underground tunnel. This and the 8^th century water system built by king Hezekiah – the impressive Siloam tunnel – show that the need to channel the water from the sources outside the walls to the inhabitants living inside them was crucial to every-day life in Jerusalem.

In recent excavations, the archaeologist Aylat Mazar claims to have found the remnants of the palace of king David, an identification made with the aid of the biblical account.

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In 1947, by the north-western tip of the Dead Sea, a few Bedouins accidentally stumbled upon what would turn out to be one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century: the Dead Sea Scrolls. Following this initial discovery of parts of seven scrolls, archaeologists uncovered a huge library, comprised of thousands of scroll fragments in different states of preservation, found in eleven different caves in the vicinity of the ruins called Qumran.

The community preserving the scrolls led a segregate lifestyle at the Qumran site from the second century B.C.E., a time at which they retreated to this desert asylum as a result of ideological disputes with mainstream Judaism based in the Jerusalem Temple, up to their destruction by Roman troops in 68 C.E. The Qumran community (considered by most scholars to be a sect called the Essenes, mentioned by Josephus, Philo and Pliny the Elder) observed strict interpretations of various laws, especially those concerning purity, and also held different views than mainstream Judaism as to the calendar that should be observed and the importance of the luminaries in setting this calendar, keeping a 364-day year, an accurate sun year according to their calculations.

The large library, kept in clay jars and preserved thanks to the dry desert air, includes many biblical scrolls, exposing to us different biblical versions current at the time as well as linguistic and spelling developments, scribal practices, and interpretations of the sacred texts. They also include many sectarian writings, revealing to us the beliefs and practices of the inhabitants of the village and some of the inner-politics of Second Temple Judaism. Some scholars suggested that the roots of early Christianity could be found at Qumran, due to the centrality of purity and baptism, however the abundance of differences causes others to doubt this hypothesis.

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The Jerusalem Temple is a general name which conveys two different temples, operating from the 10th century BCE to the 1st century CE on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with a seven-decade-long gap during the 6th century CE due to the Babylonian exile.

The Temple was the religious center of the Israelite and later Judean religion, and was the place of offerings and festivals, and included many ritual objects: the candlestick which provided light for the temple, the altar upon which the sacrifices were given, the altar of incense, and the Tabernacle, existing only during the First Temple Period, which contained the tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments and the manna. But first and foremost, the Temple was a place of prayer for all those wishing to pray to YHWH, whether Israelites or gentiles. The Temple became the religious center of the people only during the reign of Solomon, and was preceded by the desert Tabernacle and the temples of Shilo and Bethel.

The First Temple was built by Solomon, who completed David’s task of establishing the kingdom and its religious and governmental institutions. The Temple was to be the symbol of God’s presence amongst his people, as God says to Solomon: “This house which you are building, if you walk in my statutes . . . then I will keep my word with you . . . And I will dwell among the people of Israel, and I will not forsake my people, Israel” (1 Kings 6:12-13).
The First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and approximately 70 years later, the first exiles returned from Babylon and re-established the Temple. This Temple was a small and meager version of the first, but was an important symbol of the return of Israel to their land. In the 1st century CE, King Herod renovated the building and turned it into a beautiful and glorious architectural masterpiece, as the Rabbis said: “He who did not see the Temple of Herod has never seen a truly beautiful building” (Babylonian Talmud Baba Batra 4a).
The Second Temple was the center of Jewish religious and political life for over half a millennium, witnessing revolts, changes of external empires and internal governments, and many religious disputes. Among the reformers active in this Temple was Jesus, who overturned the tables of the money-changers who were working inside the temple court and drove out the animals being sold for sacrifice, in order to protest the state of the Temple and the fact that it had become a place of market rather than the house of God. The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.

Map of Jerusalem

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