Hebron

Ancient Hebron is the mound at Tel Rumeida, published also as Tell er-Rumeida and as Tel Hebron, in the Judean hill country about 30 kilometres, or 19 miles, south of Jerusalem. The modern city sits high in the hill country, at roughly 930 metres, or about 3,050 feet, above sea level, among the highest towns in the region. The identification of the mound with the biblical city is not in dispute. The older commentators give the same distance from their own sources. Albert Barnes puts Hebron twenty miles south of Jerusalem, and Bede, writing in 735, put it about twenty-two miles south. The name history sits in the text itself. The town is Kiriath-arba at Genesis 23:2, at Joshua 14:15, 15:13, 20:7 and 21:11, and again at Nehemiah 11:25 after the exile, when the older name had come back into use. Joshua 14:15 explains it: “Hebron used to be called Kiriath-arba, after Arba, the greatest man among the Anakim.” Three modern excavations have opened the mound. Philip C. Hammond dug there for the American Expedition to Hebron from 1964 to 1966, the first modern work on the site. Avi Ofer returned with the Judean Hill Country Expedition from 1984 to 1986 and produced the sequence most later work argues from. Emanuel Eisenberg of the Israel Antiquities Authority and David Ben-Shlomo of Ariel University opened a further area in 2014. The reported sequence runs like this. The earliest settlement reported at the mound is Chalcolithic, around 3500 BC. In Early Bronze III, roughly 2800 to 2500 BC, a fortified settlement of some 24 to 30 dunams stood on the mound, and it was later abandoned. The Middle Bronze city was walled in cyclopean masonry, with stones measured at up to 3 by 5 metres; it is reported to have flourished in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries BC, to have been destroyed by fire, and to have been resettled later in the same age. A cuneiform tablet from the site, an economic text listing four personal names and a set of animals, is dated to the seventeenth or sixteenth century BC, and its editors read the mix of names as a mixed pastoral population. The Late Bronze picture is thin. For the Iron Age the mound gives four-room houses and granaries, and the royal jar handles stamped for the king, Hebron, which place the town among the four administrative supply centres of the kingdom of Judah named on those stamps. The live question here is the same one that runs through Jericho: the date of the conquest. Joshua 10:36 to 10:39 has Joshua take Hebron and Joshua 11:21 has him clear the Anakim from its hill country, while the excavated sequence at Tel Rumeida is strong in the Early and Middle Bronze periods and thin in the Late Bronze period. The standard summary of the Judean hill country survey is that the region held almost no settlement then. Readers draw two conclusions from that. Those who date the conquest to the fifteenth or the thirteenth century BC hold that the archaeology has not yet turned up the town Joshua took, and account for the gap by the limits of survey evidence, by erosion at the summit, or by a smaller unwalled settlement that leaves little trace. Those who read the same data as counting against the biblical account hold that there was no Late Bronze city here to take. This page prints both readings and settles neither. Note also what nobody disputes: the mound is Hebron, it was fortified in the Bronze Age, and it was an administrative centre of Judah in the Iron Age, which is exactly the period Scripture makes most of it. A rectangular stone enclosure stands over the traditional site of the cave. The standard attribution gives it to Herod the Great, between 31 and 4 BC, and it is commonly described as the only Herodian building of its period still standing to its full height. Its walls run about 1.8 metres thick, built of ashlars at least 0.91 metres tall, some of them 7.3 metres long, and the enclosure was never roofed. The Herodian work is reported to stand on an earlier structure, possibly Hasmonean and of the second century BC, and under Byzantine rule a simple basilica was built at the south-eastern end. No published challenge to the Herodian attribution was found for this page. The chambers underneath have never been excavated and published in the modern era. In 2020 a study led by David Ben-Shlomo of Ariel University published pottery that local residents had recovered from the caves in 1981 and dated it to the eighth century BC, in the Israel Exploration Journal, arguing that the site was already receiving visitors then. That fixes a date for the visiting. It says nothing about whose graves are in the chambers, and this page says nothing either. Two Jewish traditions attached to the cave are worth naming, as reception history rather than as the meaning of Genesis 23. Bereshit Rabbah 58, a midrash on Genesis compiled in the land of Israel in roughly the fourth or fifth century AD, reads Machpelah as a doubling and offers a second reason for the name Kiriath-arba: “Alternatively, it is because four righteous men, patriarchs of the world, were buried there: Adam the first man, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” The Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 53a, redacted in Babylonia and reaching its finished form by roughly AD 500 to 600, gives the tradition its best known form: “Rabbi Yitzḥak said: The city is called Kiryat Ha’Arba, the city of four, because it is the city of the four couples buried there: Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah.” Both readings hang on the Hebrew of Joshua 14:15 and on the sense of Machpelah as doubled. Adam Clarke dismissed the same tradition in 1832. The reader sees both, and nothing in the Christian faith turns on the question. One absence is worth stating plainly, because readers ask. The site’s copy of 1 Enoch, the Charles translation of 1917, holds 1,063 verses and none of them mentions Hebron, Machpelah, Mamre, Kiriath-arba or Anak. The Anakim thread at Hebron rests on Numbers 13:33 and Joshua 11:22, which are Scripture, and on nothing else.