King Solomon’s Mines Found

Thomas Levy of UC San Diego and Mohammad Najjar of Jordan's Friends of Archaeology announced, on Oct. 28th, that their dig at a large-scale copper works, called Khirbat en-Nahas (Arabic for “ruins of copper”), in the biblical land of Edom is three hundred years older than previously thought. This readjusted timeline would place the extensive copper-smelting site squarely in the hypothesized reign of King Solomon, around 900 BC. Also, the dating challenges the long held assertion that Edom didn’t enter the Iron Age until 600 BC.


The three-stratum site has been dug down through 20 feet of slag and smelting waste to virgin soil. Egyptian artifacts found on the site leads Levy and Najjar to identify the source of the foreign goods as the military campaign of Pharaoh Sheshonq I, who’s vast campaign sought to control Egypt’s neighbors to the North, specifically Israel and Judah after the death of Solomon. The middle layer, from which the Egyptian artifacts were found, dates to 910 BC and identifies a pause in copper production.


The problem with the association of King Solomon is that there is uncertainty of his existence and the existence of his father King David. If one was to go into the field with a trowel and a Bible, the Bible is not going to explain everything one would find. The Bible has an overt message extolling the supremacy of the Israelites, if the text matches with the archaeological record or agrees with extra-biblical sources it would be assumed to be correct, but one cannot take everything for face value. Given the glorious reigns attributed to David and Solomon, in the Bible, one would notice that the kingdom of Israel is surprisingly absent from the records of neighboring states.


According to Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, "Taking the biblical description of King Solomon literally means ignoring two centuries of biblical research." What Finkelstein is referring to, is the evidence from the archaeological record so far and the scholarly analysis of the Bible. The biblical scholastic consensus is that Torah (first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and the histories (Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Kings and 1 & 2 Chronicles) are a compilation of various different sources, and written well after the events that they portray. In addition to the scholarly reasoning, it is also a question of to what level the Bible is taken literally, which varies between archaeologists. Levy maintains, "We're not answering the question" of Solomon’s existence. "But we've brought empirical data that shows we have to reevaluate those questions.” So, the argument between the biblical maximalists and the biblical minimalists continues, but with the expansion of archaeology and a site in Jerusalem being excavated by Dr. Eilat Mazar, perhaps the controversy will be solved within this millennium.


Related Sites:

Biblical Archeology Review

ScienceDaily: King Solomon's Copper Mines?

Los Angles Times: Copper ruins in Jordan bolster biblical record of King Solomon

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