New Technology Can Be Used to Verify Biblical Accounts

Dr. Yoav Vaknin (Tel Aviv University)

Can new technology help archeologists learn more about what happened during Biblical times? Researchers from four Israeli universities – Tel Aviv University, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bar-Ilan University and Ariel University – say they have achieved a breakthrough will enable archaeologists to identify burnt materials discovered in excavations and estimate their firing temperatures.

Archeologists in Israel have spent decades trying to determine how much of what is written in the Bible actually happened. Not the supernatural events like miracles that would have left no physical evidence behind, but the histories recounted in the Bible.

For example, excavations in Jerusalem have uncovered all manner of items left behind by the ancient Israelites and the kings of Judah dating all the way back to King David. There is evidence of the first temple built in Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon, and the ancient underground water tunnel of King Hezekiah was found.

But much of what is written about in the Bible is dismissed as nothing but legend or mythology largely due to a lack of physical archeological evidence. Well, that may now change if the new technology can perform as advertised.

The Israeli archeologists say they have already been able to do just that.

Applying their method to findings from ancient Gath (Tell es-Safi in central Israel), the researchers validated the Biblical account.

“About this time Hazael King of Aram went up and attacked Gath and captured it. Then he turned to attack Jerusalem” (2 Kings 12, 18).

They explain that unlike previous methods, the new technique can determine whether a certain item (such as a mud brick) underwent a firing event even at relatively low temperatures, from 200°C and up. This information can be crucial for correctly interpreting the findings.

The multidisciplinary study was led by Dr. Yoav Vaknin from the Sonia & Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, Entin Faculty of Humanities, at Tel Aviv University, and the Palaeomagnetic Laboratory at The Hebrew University.

“During the same era dwellers of other lands, such as Mesopotamia where stone was hard to come by, would fire mud bricks in kilns to increase their strength and durability,” said Dr. Vaknin. “This technique is mentioned in the story of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis.”

Vaknin explained that, until now, most researchers believed that this technology did not reach the Land of Israel until much later, with the Roman conquest. Until that time the inhabitants used sun-dried mud bricks.

“Thus, when bricks are found in an archaeological excavation, several questions must be asked,” he said. “First, have the bricks been fired, and if so, were they fired in a kiln prior to construction or in situ, in a destructive conflagration event? Our method can provide conclusive answers.”

The new method relies on measuring the magnetic field recorded and ‘locked’ in the brick as it burned and cooled down.

The clay from which the bricks were made contains millions of ferromagnetic particles – minerals with magnetic properties that behave like so many tiny ‘compasses’ or magnets. In a sun-dried mud brick the orientation of these magnets is almost random, so that they cancel out one another. Therefore, the overall magnetic signal of the brick is weak and not uniform. Heating to 200°C or more, as happens in a fire, releases the magnetic signals of these magnetic particles and, statistically, they tend to align with the earth’s magnetic field at that specific time and place. When the brick cools down, these magnetic signals remain locked in their new position and the brick attains a strong and uniformly oriented magnetic field, which can be measured with a magnetometer. This is a clear indication that the brick has, in fact, been fired.

After proving the method’s validity, the researchers applied it to a specific archaeological dispute: was a specific brick structure discovered at Tell es-Safi – identified as the Philistine city of Gath, home of Goliath – built of pre-fired bricks or burned on location? The prevalent hypothesis, based on the Old Testament, historical sources, and Carbon-14 dating attributes the destruction of the structure to the devastation of Gath by Hazael, King of Aram Damascus, around 830 BCE.

However, a previous paper by researchers including Prof. Maeir, head of the Tell es-Safi excavations, proposed that the building had not burned down, but rather collapsed over decades, and that the fired bricks found in the structure had been fired in a kiln prior to construction. If this hypothesis were correct, this would be the earliest instance of brick-firing technology discovered in the Land of Israel.

To settle the dispute, the current research team applied the new method to samples from the wall at Tell es-Safi and the collapsed debris found beside it. The findings were conclusive: the magnetic fields of all bricks and collapsed debris displayed the same orientation – north and downwards