Tall el-Hammam 2008: A Personal Perspective

Tags: sodom, gomorrah, tall el-hammam--> In January 2009, we will be back in the field for our fourth season of excavating at Tall el-Hammam1, Jordan.Situated seven miles north of the Dead Seaand nine miles east of the Jordan River, it is the largest site in the southern Jordan River Valley.Surface surveys and archaeological excavations suggest that activity at the site began with the earliest Biblical references to the region and continued intermittently right through New Testament times.Tall el-Hammam is rich with remains from almost every period.While I will have more to tell after we return and have an opportunity to analyze our finds from this season, as I leave for Jordan I wanted to share what we presently know about the site down through history, especially as it relates to the Bible. One of the most important things that happenedduring the 2008 digseason was the completion of a joint agreement with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.While we already have an excavation permit from the Kingdom’s Department of Antiquities (DoA), we now have officially entered into a whole new level of relationship with the department.The Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project (TeHEP) is now a cooperative effort between the College of Archaeology, Trinity Southwest University and the Department of Antiquities of Jordan.This partnership allows for our excavation team to work hand-in-hand with our Jordanian counterparts both in the field during the excavation season as well as in the research lab the rest of the year.Their expertise will provide great insight and support to our research. Map of the southern Jordan River Valley, the area known as the kikkar (“the plain of the Jordan” – Gn 13:10) in the Hebrew Bible.Tall el-Hammam is number 8 on the map, a site which many scholars have suggested was Abel Shittim in the time of Moses and the TeHEP thesis is that the site might have been Sodom in Abraham’s time).Note that the sites on the east side are a good distance from the Jordan River and close to the Jordan mountain range, east of the Jordan River Valley – suggesting a river flooding problem and the ancient roadway circling wide along the edge of eastern mountains.It would have been from these mountains that Balaam looked down on the Israelites and tried to curse them (Nu 22-24) and it was to these mountains that Moses ascended up to Mount Nebo and died (Dt 34). Credit: Trinity Southwest Seminary The Early Bronze Age: Tall el-Hammam and the Table of NationsThe earliest city was centered on the lower tall (tel in Hebrew [Jos 11:13] and tell or tall in Arabic; an artificial mound created by the building, destruction and rebuilding of cities at the same location) and pottery we collected here suggests that occupation goes back well before 3,000 BC. It appears the site was continuously occupied from the Chalcolithic Period through the Middle Bronze Age. The working hypothesis of the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project is that our site is the best candidate for the Biblical city of Sodom.That would make the lower tall the city mentioned in Genesis 10 (the Table of Nations).This chapter describes the post-Flood population as it spread throughout the ancient Near East, listing a number of cities by name.It says that descendants of Ham built four cities in ancient southern Mesopotamia (Babel, Erech, Accad and Calneh), four cities in northern Mesopotamia (Nineveh, Rehoboth, Calah and Resen), three cities on the western border of Canaan (Sidon, Gerar, Gaza), and five cities on Canaan’s eastern border (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim and Lasha). Scholars generally believe the Bible locates Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim (called cities of the plain/kikkar of the Jordan – Gn 13:10) on the eastern side of the Jordan River and Dead Sea. That would also locate the eastern border of Canaan and the Canaanite culture there (Gn 19:10).While rivers regularly served as ancient national borders, the Jordan River appears not to have been the eastern boundary of Canaanite culture throughout many of the Biblical periods.Apparently an even greater boundary in the area was the high Jordanian mountains.Getting up and down those mountain slopes was even more difficult than fording the Jordan River. Similarities in the archaeological evidence from both sides of the Jordan River Valley support such a cultural boundary.Pottery from the Early Bronze Age at Tall el-Hammam connects most closely to pottery at early sites west of the Jordan River. Consequently, our lower tall would represent the Sodom whose wickedness brought God’s judgment by the time of Abraham (Gn 13:13; 18:20).Based on architectural and ceramic evidence we found this season, it appears this oldest city was actually twice as large as we thought before the season began.The lower tall (over 40 acres) was surrounded by a four-meter wide city wall with towers.A continuation of the wall’s stone foundation was traced this year around the base of the upper tall (another 40 acres) as well.That would make Early Bronze Age Tall el-Hammam about a kilometer long from east to west, with a circumference of three to four kilometers – one of the largest cities at that time in all the ancient Near East. Whole storage jar from 8th-7th centuries BC, found just a foot below the modern surface of the tall.It came from the remains of a typical house of that time period. In connection with this Early Bronze city at Tall el-Hammam, and about 200 yards east of the site, is a massive dolmen field on the edge of the foothills.Dolmens are ancient miniature “Stonehenge”-type structures.Each one was constructed with upright megalithic stones serving as the four walls and flat top, 7 x 7 x 7 feet on average.While scholars are not really certain how they were used, the lack of both pottery and bones seems to suggest they were neither houses nor tombs.Instead, they may have served a cultic or ceremonial purpose, each one possibly representing an extended family.Dating as far back as the beginning of the Early Bronze Age (3000 BC), they may have served as a sort of family shrine or funerary monument for the departed. Called the Ar Rawda Dolmen Field, with over 100 extant dolmens, the area is being threatened by development.So, TeHEP is fortunate to have a couple of contemporary studies being done on this dolmen field connected to our site.An international project is conducting an ongoing spatial analysis of the dolmen field while a comprehensive survey to identify and record all the dolmens in the area has been undertaken by Hussein al-Jarrah on behalf of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities.Hussein is also the DoA director of the region where Tall el-Hammam is located, and he works side by side with us when we are excavating as a member of the TeHEP staff. The Middle Bronze Age: Tall el-Hammam in the Days of Abraham and LotThe Middle Bronze Age city, destroyed by fire, was centered on the 40-acre upper tall.In fact, the shape of the tall today is due to the construction of a mudbrick rampart which may extend from the top of the tall and down the slope all the way to that Early Bronze Age city wall at its base.On the upper tall we had already identified the rampart beneath Iron Age city structures in a number of squares.Its construction would have been a massive undertaking and evidence of both a strong government and a prosperous community. Last season we were also able to trace the Middle Bronze Age stone city wall and a couple of towers around much of the western end of the lower tall.That, along with ceramic evidence in the lower city, suggests the Middle Bronze Age city also extended over that area as well.We will need to excavate in the lower tall to clarify these things; but either way, the massive rampart makes it clear that the central city at that time was focused on the upper tall. Down twelve feet from the modern surface of Tall el-Hammam, the excavators reached a Middle Bronze Age house in a destruction layer, beneath 10 feet of Iron Age strata.Steven Collins, Director of the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project (TeHEP), is in the foreground left, the author is in the rear on the right. On the upper tall a number of mudbrick walls have been found still partially standing,

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