Beth Shemesh, Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman, BAR 23:01, Jan-Feb 1997
Culture conflict on Judah’s frontier
At 6 a.m. on April 6, 1911, a group of Arab villagers headed by a tall, red-haired, boldly mustachioed Scottish highlander named Duncan Mackenzie began to unearth a desolate hillock in Palestine believed to be Biblical Beth-Shemesh.
In the spirit of the times, Mackenzie, who had been Sir Arthur Evans’s chief assistant at the excavation of the Palace of Knossos in Crete, wanted to “penetrate to the true heart and inner mystery of Beth-Shemesh.” But after two years, the excavation broke off for lack of funds.
A quarter century later, from 1928 to 1933, Elihu Grant of Haverford College, just outside Philadelphia, led an American expedition that resumed the excavation and systematically unearthed the whole western half of the tell down to bedrock, dismantling vast portions of the successive “cities” Mackenzie had excavated. Grant published three volumes of excavation reports, but they contain mostly raw, stratigraphically confused descriptions (Grant dedicated the volumes to his brother W.T. Grant of five-and-ten-cent store fame).
Several years later, a young Biblical archaeologist named George Ernest Wright, who would later become one of the leading members of the profession in America and the excavator of Biblical Shechem, attempted to prepare a final synthesis of the Beth-Shemesh excavation. It was ingenious, but artificial. As Wright himself repeatedly emphasized, only a better-controlled excavation of the site could confirm or disprove many of his tentative conclusions.
Read the rest of Beth Shemesh in the online Biblical Archaeology Society Library.
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