Timna

For almost two decades and still continuing, Israeli archaeologist Beno Rothenberg has investigated the Timna Valley—called in Arabic wadi Mene’iyeh and known to thousands of visitors as “King Solomon’s Mines”. At first Rothenberg came almost alone to this isolated spot in the Negev about 20 miles north of Eilat, but in recent years he organized an international team of miners, geologists, physicists, historians and engineers. Rothenberg and his team have probed slag heaps and smelting camps under a blazing sun that often reaches 120 degrees fahrenheit. In the past three years, Rothenberg penetrated seemingly endless ancient mine shafts and galleries.

Although as early as 1845, the British explorer, J. Petherick recognized the mining activities in the Timna Valley from piles of slag, and although in the 1930’s the American rabbi and archaeologist Nelson Glueck and a German scholar named Fritz Frank identified seven ancient smelting sites in the valley, no one reported ore deposits other than scattered surface nodules. Glueck dated the pottery which he found scattered about the site to the 10th century B.C., the century of Solomon.

Read the rest of From These Hills … in the online Biblical Archaeology Society Library.