Shechem

Biblical Shechem is identified with Tell Balata, a mound of about four hectares at the eastern end of the pass, on the eastern edge of the modern town of Nablus. The identification rests on the geography of Deuteronomy 11:30 and Judges 9:7, on the continuity of the name through Greek Sychem and Roman Flavia Neapolis, and on the excavated remains themselves. It is not seriously contested. Ernst Sellin dug the mound for the German expedition in 1913 and 1914 and returned from 1926 to 1934, exposing the Middle Bronze fortifications, the great east gate, and a large building on the acropolis that he read as a temple. Gabriel Welter worked on the site between 1928 and 1932 and disagreed with Sellin about the stratigraphy, which is part of why the early record is hard to use. The American re-excavation, the Drew-McCormick expedition, ran from 1956 to 1973 under G. Ernest Wright with Lawrence E. Toombs and Edward F. Campbell. Wright published Shechem: The Biography of a Biblical City in 1965, and Campbell published the two later stratigraphic volumes in 1991 and 2002. That is the framework the field works from now. The building on the acropolis has walls on the order of five metres thick and an interior of roughly 26 by 21 metres, entered between two towers. Sellin called it a fortress temple, and the field also calls it a migdal temple, from the Hebrew word for tower. Sellin identified it with the temple of Baal-berith in Judges 9:4 and the temple of El-berith in Judges 9:46, and read the tower of Shechem in Judges 9:46 to 9:49 as this building. Wright accepted that identification and argued that the building's last phase, which ended in burning, matched the Abimelech episode. Others do not accept it. Their objection is that a Middle Bronze building rebuilt and reused over centuries is not by itself evidence for one episode in Judges, and that the link between the final burning and Abimelech rests on a chronological argument rather than on anything the building itself says. Both readings stand here without a verdict. What is not disputed is that a very large temple stood on the acropolis, that it was rebuilt more than once, and that it ended in fire. A large standing stone, a massebah roughly a metre and a half wide, was found near that building's entrance and re-erected by the excavators. Sellin connected it to the stone of Joshua 24:26 and to the pillar in Shechem of Judges 9:6, and Wright kept the connection open. Others hold that standing stones in front of Bronze Age temples are ordinary in Canaanite practice, and that nothing on this one ties it to either verse. The stone is real and both readings of it are named here. A ruler named Labayu of Shechem writes to the Egyptian court in the fourteenth-century BC Amarna correspondence, and neighbouring rulers accuse him of handing territory to the habiru. Some readers connect that with the fact that Joshua records no battle for Shechem, since the city simply appears in Israel's hands. The connection is an inference drawn from two separate bodies of evidence, and it is offered here as an inference rather than as a demonstrated result. Adam Zertal surveyed Manasseh from 1980 and excavated a stone structure on the northeastern ridge of Mount Ebal from 1982 to 1989. He reported a rectangular installation roughly 9 by 7 metres with a ramp, filled with ash, holding a large quantity of animal bone dominated by young male cattle, sheep, goats and fallow deer. He dated it to Iron Age I and identified it with the altar of Joshua 8:30, publishing the case in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1985. Aharon Kempinski answered in the same journal in 1986 that the structure reads better as an Iron Age I watchtower or farmstead, and Israel Finkelstein and others have questioned both the cultic identification and the dating. Zertal replied in turn. A later claim, made from 2019 by Scott Stripling and colleagues, that a small inscribed lead object recovered from the excavation's discarded material carries an early Hebrew curse text, has been strongly disputed by epigraphers including Christopher Rollston. Scripture leads here: Joshua built an altar on Ebal and read the law there. Zertal's identification of one structure with that altar is one reading of the evidence, and his critics are named with their arguments. The well called Bir Ya'qub lies at the foot of Gerizim near the eastern mouth of the pass, a short walk from the mound. It is cut through rock and is about 40 metres deep. Scripture never says Jacob dug a well. John says only that Jacob's well was there, and gives the woman's own words about her father Jacob. The tradition, though, is old and undivided. The well is named by the Bordeaux pilgrim in AD 333, by Jerome around AD 400 in his account of Paula's pilgrimage, and by pilgrim accounts ever since. A Byzantine church stood over it from about the late fourth century, the Crusaders rebuilt it in the twelfth, and the present Greek Orthodox church over it was begun in 1893. No rival site has ever gathered a following. That is a tradition with dated witnesses, and it is offered as one. The same holds for Joseph's tomb: Joshua 24:32 says Joseph's bones were buried at Shechem in the plot Jacob bought, a traditional tomb stands near the mound, and the Bordeaux pilgrim already names a tomb of Joseph in this area in AD 333. Its later history is disputed, and that is all this page says about it. Yitzhak Magen excavated on Mount Gerizim from 1982 into the 2000s and reported a walled sacred precinct on the summit with a substantial settlement around it, expanded in the early second century BC. Josephus tells the story of the temple's founding in the time of Alexander and records its destruction by John Hyrcanus, usually dated about 128 BC. Magen's excavated dating for the earliest precinct is earlier than the date Josephus implies, and that difference is a live question in the field. The sharpest textual point between the two traditions sits in the same place: the Samaritan text of Deuteronomy 27:4 reads Mount Gerizim where the Masoretic Text reads Mount Ebal. Support for the Gerizim reading has been claimed from an Old Latin manuscript and from a fragment published in 2008, and both claims are argued over. Each community reads its own text, and neither text is called a forgery here. A Samaritan community keeps the Torah and keeps the Passover sacrifice on Mount Gerizim to this day, which is why the woman's question in John 4:20 is a live one rather than an antique one. This site holds no photograph of the mound, the temple foundation, the standing stone, the well or the mountains, so this band runs on the published record rather than on pictures.