Religion: The Pool of Gibeon

About four centuries after David’s men beat Saul’s at the pool of Gibeon (“And they caught every one his fellow by the head, and thrust his sword in his fellow’s side, so they fell down together”), Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar rumbled down from the north to pillage.* When he withdrew, after raids in 598 and 587 B.C., the people of Gibeon must have found their city wrecked and the pool contaminated. Apparently they tumbled in boulders from the town’s wreckage, then filled the well’s broad stone shaft with earth, clay and bits of pottery.

The city and the well were lost to history until this summer, when—after two seasons of excavation at a site called El-Jib a few miles north of Jerusalem—the pool of Gibeon began to flow again. Its discoverer: Archaeologist James B. Pritchard, who in 1951 found the palace of Herod at Jericho.

Pottery at a Premium. Searching three years ago for Gibeon, Dr. Pritchard surveyed 39 sites, picked El-Jib partly because its name, transliterated from Hebrew to Arabic, might well be a blurred rendering of Gibeon. Last year Pritchard began to dig (his expedition was financed by the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, where he teaches Biblical Hebrew). Four feet below the surface at El-Jib Pritchard found the walls of houses, then evidence of a 26-ft.-thick wall surrounding the town, and finally the rim of a pool 37 ft. across.

Concentrating on the pool, Pritchard made such exciting finds of pottery that this year he began to pay premium rates to 100 native diggers, set them to work two shifts a day hauling out debris in baskets made of old auto tires. In short order they had dug past the well’s first stage—a broad shaft cut out of limestone 33 ft. deep, faced with a spiral staircase. Then the diggers excavated a narrower tunnel with steps cut in its side to reach a broad water-drawing room 82 ft. below the surface.

Wood, Water & Wine. Even more important than this elaborately planned water system (which must have been a labor of years for slaves working with primitive bronze tools) was the rubble hauled out of the well. Among the finds: pottery painted in red and yellow with designs of birds, which may force revision of the theory held by many archaeologists that because of Moses’ injunction against idolatry ancient Jews shunned imagery. Also unearthed: pottery wine jars (the first found in 67 years of Palestine archaeology), which offer a clue to Palestine’s early economy and confirm that the men of Gibeon were not only “hewers of wood and drawers of water” but also drinkers of wine. Since the jars bear the names of wine-making firms (Hananiah, Azariah and Amariah), they also offer scholars one of the largest finds of Hebrew writing of an era some 500 years before the Dead Sea Scroll period.

*Among other events at Gibeon mentioned in the Bible: the siege by Amorite kings which was lifted by Joshua as the sun stood still and stones rained down on the fleeing besiegers (Joshua 10); the slaughter of Amasa by Joab (II Samuel 20); Solomon’s dream of wisdom (I Kings 3:5-15).