Earthquakes and King Solomon’s Mines in the Jordan Valley

The Jordan Valley Photo: Tango7174

The Jordan Rift valley - Earthquakes Galore!

Here in Israel we’ve just experienced five mild but noticeable earthquakes in six days.  People are wondering whether there’s a big one on the way.  We have a lot of earthquakes here.  It’s not at all surprising.  We live right at the edge of the Jordan Rift Valley where the African and Arabian Plates meet.  These are so-called tectonic plates.  They are huge slabs of the Earth’s crust that float on the surface of the molten rock below.  Very, very slowly they move with respect to each other.  At these junctions, the movement of the plates gives rise to volcanoes and earthquakes.  The Golan Heights were created by volcanic activity.    Earthquakes have occurred along and around the Jordan Valley throughout recorded history. 

Mt of Olives Earthquake Damage 1927
Photo: Matson Collection 

On July 11th 1927 an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale damaged buildings in Jericho, Tiberias, Ramle, Nablus and Jerusalem (including the domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the al-Aqsa Mosque) and killed at least 500 people.  On January 1st 1837 an earthquake in the Jordan Vally east of Safed was felt up to 500 kilometres away but the main damage was in Safed, Tiberias and in Galilee villages.  Thousands of people died in Safed where the whole Jewish Quarter was destroyed. 


The Great Earthquake of 749

Fallen Columns at Sussita
Photo: Akos Nagy


Major earthquakes were recorded during every era in the history of the Holy Land but the most famous of all was in the shemitta year 749.  Whole cities were laid waste.   In Jerusalem the al-Aqsa Mosque and four Muslim palaces around the south-western corner of the Temple Mount were destroyed.  Take a trip to Beit Shean at the junction of the Jordan and Jezreel Valleys or to Sussita (Hippos) on the Golan Heights and you will see the results of this devastating earthquake.  Buildings and columns lie where they fell.  If you look carefully you will see that in Beit Shean the columns fell pointing north and in Sussita they fell pointing south.  Why should this be?  It is visible evidence that the Arabian plate on which Sussita and the Golan Heights sit is moving north with respect to the African plate which includes Beit Shean and the Land of Israel.

Timna and Feinan – Two Halves of a Crater 100 km Apart

Way down south in the Arava Valley, about 26 km north of Eilat, at Timna are the northernmost deposits of copper to be found in Israel.  There are ancient copper mines here.  Timna sits in the western half of a machtesh – a crater caused by erosion.  To find the eastern half of the crater and the copper deposits it contains you must travel 100 km north to Feinan on the Jordanian side of the Arava.  This is biblical Punon where the Children of Israel stopped on their way from Egypt.  Some 30 million years ago movement between the tectonic plates in the Jordan Rift Valley separated the two halves of the crater.

King  Solomon’s Mines?

King Solomon's Pillars Timna
Photo: Chmee2

Timna also hit the news this week.  Tel Aviv University archaeologist Erez Ben-Yosef used carbon dating to examine organic remains from the ancient copper mines here.  He concluded that the mines were from the Iron Age – the time of King Solomon.  Are the legends of King Solomon’s Mines true after all?

Already 6,000 years ago prehistoric man began to extract the copper deposits that could be found at Timna and to produce pure copper by smelting the ore at high temperatures.  At first copper deposits above the ground were exploited.  Over time the miners began to dig open pits then shallow “burrows” and eventually deeper mine shafts to reach the valuable metal ore.  For a time it was thought that these were the legendary King Solomon’s Mines.  Three large sandstone columns formed by erosion became known as King Solomon’s Pillars. 




Egyptian Rock Painting, Timna
Photo: Shlomo Chetrit

The first archaeological exploration of the copper mines at Timna began in 1959.  The archaeologist Beno Rothenberg discovered an Egyptian temple to the goddess Hathor.   Hathor is the goddess of fertility and also the goddess of mining.  This, together with a huge rock painting showing Pharaoh Rameses III paying homage to Hathor seemed to confirm his theory that the major mining enterprise here was Egyptian and dated to the 12th and 13th centuries BCE.  Later, after the Egyptians left Timna, Midianites took over the mining and altered the temple to fit with their rituals and beliefs.

The recent carbon dating evidence gives a strong indication that the mines are not Egyptian but from the Iron Age period.  Ben-Yosef believes that the mines were operated by the Edomites a people that lived along the Jordan Valley.  They abandoned the mines in the 10th century BCE perhaps because of an Egyptian invasion or perhaps due to competition from copper produced in Cyprus.  Are these King Solomon’s Mines?  We can’t say that.  But who knows – they may have supplied his building projects with precious copper.

Beit Shean and Timna Park are fascinating and extensive sites well worth visiting.  Follow the links for more information.

Sussita isn’t really accessible for unaccompanied tourists yet but here’s a link to the Hippos / Sussita excavation project.

And the Egyptians ill-treated us...

One of the ways we describe the festival of Passover is “z’man heruteinu”.  It is the festival of our redemption, of our freedom from slavery in Egypt.  As a child this always puzzled me because my father ע"ה was born in Egypt, actually on the first day of Passover, and grew up there.  How did he sit with his family around the seder table celebrating having been taken out of Egypt when he was still living there?  It is a mystery to me!

The Bible tells us that the Egyptians enslaved the Children of Israel in Egypt.  The archaeologists and historians add that they ruled over the land of Canaan during the Late Bronze Age, from 1550 BCE to 1200 BCE.  In Biblical terms this was the time of Joseph in Egypt through the Exodus to the time when the Israelites approached the Land of Israel.  So where in Israel can we see evidence of those 350 years of Egyptian domination?

Megiddo

Megiddo City Gate Photo: Golf Bravo

Megiddo is a huge and impressive archaeological site.  It’s not surprising.  It was one of the mightiest city states in Canaan.  For thousands of years it dominated the ancient trade route between Egypt to the south and the empires to the north and east.  It has been the site of some critical battles.  The last of these was the British General Allenby’s defeat of the Turkish army in 1917.

Thutmose III attacks his enemies

from the temple at Karnak

In 1482 BCE the King of Mitanni was stirring up revolt in Canaan against Egypt.  Pharaoh Thutmose III marched north with his army to put down the rebellion.  The Canaanite forces gathered for battle near Megiddo.  Thutmose took the Canaanites by surprise by choosing the most dangerous but most direct route from the coastal road through the valleys to Megiddo.  The next day the two armies met on the battlefield.  When the Egyptian infantry charged the Canaanites fled and sought refuge in Megiddo.  Instead of pressing their advantage the Egyptian troops took time out to loot the Canaanite camp.  They lost the element of surprise.  It took a seven month siege before Megiddo fell to Thutmose.  Egypt continued to rule Caanaan for the next 300 years and established garrisons in Megiddo and around the country in Gaza, Beit Shean and Afeq.   In an inscription at the Temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt Thutmose recorded that 119 cities in Canaan had bowed down before him. 

Jerusalem

A letter from Tel el-Amarna

In 1887 a peasant woman was digging in the ruins of el-Amarna in Upper Egypt when she came across a pile of palm-sized clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform script in Accadian, the diplomatic language of the Late Bronze Age.  What she had discovered was Egypt’s Foreign Office archive from the time of Pharaoh Akhenaten.  These were mainly letters between the Egyptian administration and their representatives and client kings in Canaan and Amurru (modern Lebanon).  Six of the letters are from Abdi-Heba, the king of Jerusalem, to Pharaoh.  He pleads with Pharaoh to help defend against attacks from neighbouring cities and from nomadic fighters called the Apiru.  One letter opens:

“Say to the king, my lord: Message of Abdi-Heba, your servant. I fall at the feet of my lord 7 times and 7 times.  Consider the entire affair.  Milkilu and Tagi brought troops into Qiltu against me... ...May the king know (that) all the lands are at peace (with one another), but I am at war.  May the king provide for his land. ...”

In 2009, while the archaeologist Eilat Mazar was excavating a gatehouse tower in the wall of First Temple Jerusalem, a small fragment of a clay tablet with fragments of nine lines of Akkadian cuneiform script.  We don’t know for sure but this seems to be a fragment of one of Abdi-Heba’s letters to Pharaoh – a copy perhaps stored in his archive.  You can see it on display in the Davidson Centre in Jerusalem.

Anthropoid coffin from Deir el-Balah:

Hecht Museum, Photo: Hanay

At the entrance to the Archaeology Wing of the Israel Museum there is a group of strange anthropoid coffins from the Late Bronze Age.  They were discovered at Deir el-Balah, a few kilometres south-west of Gaza.  They may have been made for Egyptians but they certainly reflect the influence of Egypt in Canaan at that time.  The Hecht Museum in Haifa also has an anthropoid coffin from this period.

Beit Shean



Inscribed tablet governor's house

Beit Shean. Photo: Yukatan

Mention Beit Shean and most people think of the magnificent remains of Scythopolis, a Roman Byzantine city destroyed by an earthquake in 749.  At the northern edge of the Roman city is Tell el-Husn, the mound of ancient and biblical Beit Shean - an Egyptian regional centre for 300 years.  An Egyptian basalt stele (standing stone) was found here celebrating the defeat by Pharaoh Seti I of a group of Canaanite cities that tried to capture the city in 1318 BCE.  The governor’s house from the time of a later Pharaoh Ramses III was built in Egyptian style from mud bricks.  A bust of the Pharaoh stands in one of the rooms.  Over the doorpost was a stone tablet bearing the name of the governor, Ramse-Weser Khepesh, and his titles.  The stone artefacts on display are copies.  The originals are in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.

Timna Valley

Solomon's Pillars Timna Valley

Photo: Chmee2

Copper has been mined in the Timna Valley,in the south west Aravah about 30 km north of Eilat, for over 6,000 years.   In the Late Bronze Age the Egyptians established a sophisticated copper mining and production centre here.  Their mine shafts can still be seen.  Three huge sandstone pillars, known as Solomon’s Pillars, stand near the copper mines.  At their base is a small temple to Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of mining.  The engraved stelae in the temple contain a lot of information about the groups of Egyptians who came to mine here.  Above the temple on the side of one of the sandstone pillars is a carving of Ramses III with Hathor.

A Final Word?

Merneptah Stele
Photo: Webscribe

Mernheptah, the son of Ramses II, reigned from 1213 – 1203 BCE.  He was the last Egyptian king to personally enter Canaan to put down a rebellion.  In 1896 A basalt stone known as the Merneptah Stele was found at the Pharaoh’s burial temple in Thebes in Egypt.  A part of the inscription refers to Mernheptah’s victories during a military campaign in Canaan.  It includes the earliest known reference to Israel.  It reads:

“Canaan is captive with all woe. Ashkelon is conquered, Gezer seized, Yanoam made nonexistent; Israel is wasted, its seed is no more.”

The scholars tell us that “Israel” here refers to a people, the Ancient Israelites, rather than to a state and that the “seed” refers to its supply of grain.  Even so this is one of many times when our conquerors have underestimated our resilience.  As the Passover Haggadah tells us:

“For not just one alone has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise against us to destroy us; and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand!”

Chag sameach!