Abraham of Silwan

One of the more abiding memories of our recent trip to Jerusalem has to be our serendipitous encounter with Abraham, whose business card I kept. It reads;

Pool of Siloam Antiquities

Ancient Pottery, Roman Glass, Old Coins

Abraham Siam

Jerusalem, Silwan, PO Box 20230

Not only did Abraham detain us for a pleasurable hour in his shop, but he gave us a human face with which to begin to comprehend the Israeli-Palestinian situation. 

 Evie,  Janna and Abraham in his shop 

I have no doubt that Abraham's penchant for regaling us with tales was aimed in part, at exchanging a small part of his collection of ancient bric-a-brac for our tourist dollars, or even for promoting the interests of his Palestinian community, but he did it in such an endearing way that I could not possibly hold it against him. For the fruit of his labors, I bought my wife a Widow’s Mite pendant; a tiny Herodian coin that he had set in an attractive silver mount. The coin itself would have been like the ones of the subject of Jesus’ observations in Mark 12:41-44  and Luke 21:1-4. The pendant came with a printed card;

CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY

Pool of Siloam Antiquities

Abraham Siam

Jerusalem PO Box 20230

This Is To Certify That The Following Are Authentic

WIDOW’S MITE IN JESUS TIME

Signature [Abraham Siam]

Abraham told us that he was an Israeli Palestinian, whose family had lived in the village of Silwan for at least 150 years. I didn’t ask, but I am fairly certain he was a devout Moslem, because he insisted on reading out a blessing on us from a book with a photo of the Dome on the Rock on its cover (the blessing was gratefully received), and he also had the kind of mark on his forehead that you get when you regularly press your head onto a prayer-carpet, as devout Moslems do.

Abraham also claimed to have been on several digs, including at least one led by Kathleen Kenyon. She was the daughter of Sir Frederick Kenyon, former Director of the British Museum and archaeologist who promoted Biblical archaeology with the firm belief that it corroborated the narrative of the historical records of the New Testament (a belief that has been mostly vindicated by the record). Frederick Kenyon is commonly quoted in his defense of the reliable transmission of scripture; “the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed”. I wonder how these connections with Christian apologetics would have interacted with Abraham’s Moslem faith, but we didn’t get to discuss it. Abraham also told us of his good relationship with one of the local Christian Priests (Catholic, if I recall) who served at one of the many Basilicas in the Old City, and I have no reason to doubt him.

My curiosity piqued at how Abraham amassed his small horde of antiquities. Many years ago, in my previous visit to Israel, I helped with the excavations at Gamla in the Golan Heights. Of course, any glass, coins, flint razors, potsherds that came to light were promptly handed over to the professional archaeologists for logging and preserving. Did Abraham sneak his trophies out in his pockets at the end of a hard days digging and sifting? I doubt it, but the kind of stuff on his shelves was so abundant and commonplace in this part of the world, the professionals might not have been too anxious to keep all of it.

Notwithstanding Abraham's (unconfirmed) Moslem faith, I was impressed at his knowledge and reverence for the Prophet Jesus, and the healing of the blind man at the Pool of Siloam (see John 9). Before you get confused, you must understand that there are two rival sites for the pool, which I will explain shortly. Abraham claimed he had seen at least two healings in “his” pool; one was of a man with a fever who dipped himself in the water and came up well. I have no way of verifying these accounts (were they true miracles or not?), and in a way I have no desire to. If someone’s fever broke during a dunk in the waters, I, like Abraham, thank God. However, I will note my single misgiving, which was the slightest hint that the pool itself was talismanic. Sure, a wonderful event had happened there, but it wasn’t the pool that was special; it was the person who had sent the blind man to it. If I were to talk this over with Abraham, I would plead with him to see that God is not in the pool; He is in the person of His Son, to whom the pool owes it’s special place in history. We all have a tendency to turn God’s visitations into talismans in the hope that the miracle will recur, but that’s a subject for another post.

We chanced upon Abraham’s little shop at the end of a self-guided tour of the City of David. To describe how this inter-relates, I’m going to have to explain some geography, history and some of the messages I perceived along the tour.

David’s City is so called because it’s the ancient Jerusalem that David conquered and made the capital of his dynasty (about 1000 BC). It is located south of the Temple Mount (on which the Dome of the Rock is built), on an unobtrusive spur outside the current city walls which, being medieval, are relatively modern. If you’re at the Western Wall (the “Wailing Wall” and the geographic centre of the Jewish faith) you turn right, go downhill through the Dung Gate and cross a road. Importantly, the spur of David's City is/was occupied by a Palestinian Village called Silwan, which gets its name from the eponymous pool at it’s southernmost tip. Over several thousand years, the City of Jerusalem has migrated north by a few hundred meters, such that David’s City now lies under the Palestinian village of Silwan.

The Israeli authorities have sustained a well-funded archaeological dig into David’s City and tourists like us can enjoy the findings by a well-accommodated self-guided tour. The cost of the tour varies according to your chosen route; it costs slightly less if you follow the dry tunnel, and more if you wish to adventure through the longer wet tunnel.

The tour of the dig starts at the uphill end of David’s City, over the inauspiciously named “Large Stone Structure”. There is, I understand, some debate over whether this is actually David’s Palace (see 2 Chronicles 2:12 etc), so it retains its uncommitted moniker. On top of the stones that could, or could not, have been David’s famous palace, are parts of the walls that Nehemiah built (Nehemiah 2:17-18, Nehemiah 3 etc). Then comes the tunnel, which forks part way through the caverns to the dry or wet tunnels. The dry tunnel is an early Canaanite drift that previously directed water into the Kedron Valley, probably for farm irrigation. The wet tunnel continues to function as Hezekiah intended, by directing water from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam. Sharp-eyed Bible-students will note that Siloam means “sent” (John 9:7), and I wonder if it got it’s name from the water that was sent to it by Hezekiah’s tunnel.

Coming out into the daylight from the Canaanite tunnel, the tour continues southward along the eastern flank of the spur. Here, the signboards point to the ancient Jewish occupation of David’s City, which includes a Mikveh (ceremonial bathtub) cut directly into the rock. Of course, in order to unearth these ancient structures, the archaeologists had to remove the overburden, which is something I’ll return to presently.

A remarkably anachronistic feature of the tour was the preservation of the Meyuchas House, which dates to 1873 and marks the start of the modern Jewish settlement of the site. I found it overtly political. Why preserve a 19^th Century Jewish house, whilst displacing the current Palestinian occupants of Silwan? It seems to me that no small part of the reason for the dig was to legitimize Israeli supremacy in the area, which would explain why the dig was so well supported and promoted by the Israeli authorities. We also passed a couple of groups of Israeli Army recruits, who were seated in circles on the grass to receive an education in the ancient history of their homeland. Perhaps there’s a better archaeological reason for the preservation of the Meyuchas House, but it eludes me; more so after hearing Abraham tell his tales.

The tour ends at the Pool of Siloam within the archaeological precinct. Like most archaeology, it’s disputed. Unfortunately for Abraham, the pool to which Jesus sent the blind man was probably this one and not the Byzantine Pool, adjacent to his shop.

I was disappointed to find that the archaeological precinct made no mention of the Gospel story of the healing. Maybe, its because such a story cannot be regarded as archaeology. Anyhow, I wonder if a small plaque would have been in order because of the pool’s significance to the many Christians who regularly visit the site. Again, I was unable to suppress a sneaking suspicion about the dig’s decidedly pro-Israeli agenda. Perhaps it was prompted by yet another small group of Israeli-Army recruits who were being lectured there (in English) about the brave stand made there by the last of the Jewish revolutionaries during the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD70. The stories of the ancient Jewish Resistance would have been of more interest to building up army morale, than an unscientific tale of the healing of a blind man.

After visiting the Pool of Siloam, we continued through another excavation, which had unearthed the drainage pipe in which the last of the revolutionaries had hidden from the Romans. Then, up an makeshift staircase to the road, where a minibus promised to take us back up to the top of the spur.

Only, through a gate in the wall opposite, there was another stone staircase that led down to the Byzantine Pool of Siloam. It is probably a pool which was dug as part of a Byzantine Church built to celebrate the healing of the blind man. The Byzantine Church was now buried under the rubble of time, but the pool marks the exit to Hezekiah’s tunnel, and there were plenty of trails of wet footprints to indicate the recent traffic through the site. There were no plaques here to explain the site, which is probably because it lay outside the limits of the archaeological precinct; the same reason why Abraham’s tiny shop continues to trade there.

The relationship between Abraham’s shop, and the archaeological precinct, however, was strained. He railed that the Israeli authorities would not let him erect any signs pointing people to “his” pool or his shop, which had starved him of legitimate business. When we pointed out that someone had taken a spray-can and graffitied the words “Pool of Siloam” on the stonework at the gate to the Byzantine Pool, Abraham returned a knowing smile; it was the only advertising he could do. I can understand his frustration that “his” pool was not part of the official narrative, and hence it, and his occupation, was officially overlooked. Abraham had resorted to drumming up business by spruiking at the gate, which he did with disarming effectiveness.

I don’t have the records, but I feel sure that I passed by Abraham’s shop when I was last in Jerusalem, about 25 years ago. At that time, there were no fences, fees and turnstiles, and the trek through Hezekiah’s tunnel was made hazardous by the potential sewage infiltration from the village above (a problem the authorities appear to have fixed in the intervening years). It might be just my impression, but the Jewish presence seems to have grown, together with its assertion of Jewish supremacy. That was certainly Abraham’s complaint. He felt that he and his family, who had been there for many generations, were being pushed out.

We thanked Abraham for the instant coffee that he insisted on giving us, and for the delight he took in showing us his curios and the stories that they told. We took the minibus back up the hill, which dropped us off at the entry gate. On the other side of the road, the excavation had expanded to consume a whole village block, which was something new since my previous visit. In years to come, I’m sure this area will be fitted out with another trail for us tourists to wander.

Looking through the hoarding that ringed the new excavation, I wondered if they would they find David’s Palace below. As I did so, I also wondered how many Palestinian homes they had to remove to continue their explorations there.

My thoughts came to haunt me a few days later, as we drove to the airport past the security walls and razor wire that separated the Palestinian villages from the Jewish Settlements; and as we waited for our plane at the airport. At the immigration desks, we queued behind a large group of American Youths, presumably on their way home, wearing blue tee-shirts with the slogan “Israel Birthright”. Who told these people, who had been born half way round the globe, that their “birthright” was currently someone else’s home? Did they not know that in order to take up residence in the land of their “birthright”, they might have to displace someone who is not on the official agenda? Reluctantly, I recalled that the nation of Israel draws its legitimacy from the legacies of the Ghetto and Lebensraum (we visited the Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem, on another day), and I hope that the looming irony is not lost on the current generation of Jews, both resident and living overseas.

My loyalties to Jew and Palestinian, which previously veered towards the historic sons of Abraham, never felt more divided. Neutrality is not an option, but neither is the imperative to deal with the issues humanely and with open eyes. Perhaps that’s the only way forward. I pray for the peace of Jerusalem and all it’s inhabitants (Psalm 122:6).

Can you trust the archaeological evidence?

In a follow-up query from a FaceBook friend, I was asked, “Can you trust the archaeological evidence?”

Here is my reply; In short, it would be wise not to ignore it.  

Welcoming the evidence

The Christian world-view ought to fortify us for honest enquiries, and I think Christians should not be as terrified of archaeology and the sciences as some would like us to be. As I noted previously, Jeremiah says the word of the Lord came to him and asked him what he saw (Jeremiah 1:11, 1:13). Note that it is not what God saw, but what Jeremiah saw that's under consideration here, and he wrote the book, so we should notice what he says about his own oracle.

This point is worth pondering. The Bible is consistent and persistent in valuing truth and truthfulness. Jesus declared that “…the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32). The Wisdom literature in the Biblbe urges us to look and ponder what we see. Proverbs 3:5-7 states;

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding
In all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.
Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and shun evil.

I have a particular concern about this verse at present, because it is often quoted in Christian culture as a reason not to think about what we see. How silly! The entire Book of Proverbs enjoins us to think, learn and to gain understanding above all else. Are we to believe that the author committed his life’s wisdom to the book, then some evil apostate sneaked in a verse that up-ends the entire work? I don’t think so. What the verse refers to is the exact opposite of what it has often been used for. It says “you will not find wisdom or knowledge by looking in your own heart; what you need to do is to learn from God, who speaks to you by His word; And, you will need to allow what’s in your heart to be shaped by what is outside it.” It’s an instruction to allow our thoughts and our understanding to be shaped by what see outside ourselves, not by the predispositions, prejudices and motives that we find in our own hearts. It’s a command to submit to the discipline of thinking, not to avoid it because what we see might make us feel uncomfortable.

What are those things that are outside ourselves? Two obvious answers are the world in which we live, and the Word of God. Our Christian faith ought to predispose us to welcome the evidence, not to ignore it. Indeed, despite the propaganda of prevailing culture, the Christian faith has more to drive us to understand the world in which we live than any other world-view, particularly atheism and magisterial religions such as Islam and Mormonism (which stultify the search for knowledge for different reasons).  

Data and inferences

The Bible, in my reading of it, presents a holistic view of understanding and wisdom by saying that if we understand the world in which we live; we are likely to make right decisions. I don’t wish to contend with it, but it’s a different question than the one you might be asking, which is; can we trust the data?

My personal response is that the data are neutral. What is important is what we infer from them in our decision-making, which is, to me, the essence of wisdom. In other words, I believe the data are important, and it is important to get good data, but they will not direct us in our thinking – we do that, and we do it for the entire smorgasbord of reasons, good and bad, that make us human. Acknowledging this (and, again, it’s a Christian perspective) ought to fortify us as we look at the data, and the inferences that people draw from them.

An important feature of this is to acknowledge why the data have been collected in the first place. I’m an anti-conspiracy-theorist, which means I don’t buy some of the more sinister motives that anti-scientists ascribe to the scientific community. But, even if the scientists' motives for collecting and publishing data are nefarious, the good news is that the data they collect are neutral. In other words, we can look at the data, but we can be discerning in what meaning we draw from them, and the meaning that I draw from them might not coincide with the archaeologists' or scientists' original inferences.  

Digs

You asked about archaeological evidence, so that’s what I’ll address next. Please forgive the lengthy preamble, but I would like to illustrate how my hermeneutic relates to some of the archaeology.

Before going to University, I took a gap year and spent about six months on a Kibbutz in Israel. At one point, I took a few days off to join in with an archaeological dig at Gamla in the Golan Heights. Gamla was sacked by the Romans in AD68, when they crushed the Jewish revolt. Next to fall were Jerusalem in AD70 and, finally, Masada in AD72.

After I had left the dig, I found that the location I was digging in was near the Synagogue that the dig-leaders were anxious to find. They had thought it might be near the centre of the settlement, but as it turned out, it was at the wall that the residents had erected as a defence against the Romans, where I had been active with my shovel.

To understand why the dig-leaders thought that finding a Synagogue was important, we need to understand what it meant in the current geo-political context. The Golan heights were (and are) disputed territory. The discovery of a Jewish Synagogue would do two things 1) reinforce the reasons for the dig, and hence allow the dig-leaders to appeal for more money and 2) legitimize modern Israel’s occupation of the Golan heights by staking a claim on the territory based on antiquity.
 
Even though you might disagree with these motives, the fact remains that the dig now gives us a better picture of Jewish life around that time, and we are richer for it. For instance, we can see a real-life example of the kind of Synagogue that Jesus would have taught in. We can also see what happens when a people put their faith in their ethnic/cultural/religious identity before faith in Christ (I’m referring to the Jewish revolt and the consequent annihilation of the Temple-system by the Romans).

Again, what I’m saying here is that you should look at the archaeological evidence, but you’re not compelled to agree with other people’s inferences of it.

Archaeological evidence around the New Testament

I’m going to refrain from using the phrase “archaeological evidence of the Bible”, because I believe that such a statement misunderstands the issue.

The good news for Christians is that much of the evidence supports the narratives of the New Testament; it attests to the New Testament accounts. The environment, culture, place-names, people of the Bible fit well into the environment that the extra- Biblical archaeological evidence and historic sources describe. However, there are some contentious areas and it would be unwise to ignore them.

It has been my interest, and my joy, to release the Biblical stories back into their “native environment”, which is described by the archaeology. I have found that this brings the stories to life in ways that are quite unexpected and sometimes challenging. I refer you to some of the earlier notes I made on Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan Woman at Jacob’s well to see what I mean. For example, being able to project this story onto its archaeological background, like one of the son-et-lumiere presentations you sometimes see projected on mediaeval castle walls, has got me reading the Gospel of John in a new and refreshing light.

The biggest problems that I am aware of in the New Testament are;
• The details of the death of Judas (compare Matt 27:5 with Acts 1:18-19)
• Whether there was a census under Qurinius around the birth of Jesus, as described in Luke 2:2

It’s a very short list, and I don’t think these problems are insurmountable, though I concede that we might need to stretch the text a little. For instance, Judas might have strung himself up (per Matthew), then his corpse might have fallen off the gibbet causing his guts to explode (per Acts). In any case, the point of both accounts seems to be that he died a shameful death. The census might be resolved if we accept that Quirinius was the de-facto governor of Syria, and that this particular census didn’t find it’s way into the annals (which would be unusual, but not impossible). Still, there was a Quirinius, there was a Syria, and they did censuses, according to all the available extra-Biblical evidence.

Archaeological evidence around the Old Testament

This is a huge subject, which is hotly contested by a number of learned societies. I’m not going to do it justice, so I trust that you will forgive my rather cursory treatment of it. Much of the controversy relates to time-lining the development of the Biblical texts. I’ll try to give you an overview and to do this, I’ll work backwards.

The later Biblical texts are usually accepted as extant (the events they describe to occurred at the time of writing, or soon before). These texts are usually identified by the language (late Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek translations), and the consensus is that they comprise much of the Wisdom Literature (I understand). The Psalms, for example, seem to be a very mixed bag, including many of the earlier works, but many phrases, language and ideas appear to have been re-cycled in the later Psalms. (Incidentally, this “recycling” causes me no problem whatsoever, because that’s exactly what we do in our modern hymns and songs of praise.)

The earlier texts are more contentious, and there is much speculation. Humanistic scholarship insists on dismissing anything that might have the slightest hint of the miraculous, so it ascribes the origins of the stories not in some miracle, but in folk-religion. The critical period, according to this perspective, is around the centralist reforms of King Josiah. The redaction camp use this to argue that the Priests of Josiah commandeered and formalized the folk-religion of Israel and Judah to legitimize Josiah’s reign in Jerusalem. There is actual support for this from the Biblical narrative itself - 2 Kings 22 describes the rediscovery of the Book of the Law, and we could legitimately ask what they did with it when they found it. We honestly can't be certain, but the more negative inferences would tell us that characters such as Abraham and Moses were not real people, but rather mythological constructs on which the folk-stories were projected, rather like the legends of King Arthur or Robin Hood (which vary according to who is telling the story).

Importantly, the humanist camp dismisses any idea that the Exodus was a real event, or that David and Solomon actually reigned over a united kingdom, and these are the areas in which the archaeology can be called as a witness.

As far as the Exodus is concerned, the humanists have a point. There is no archaeological evidence for the kind of mighty upheaval that you might expect following the conquest of Joshua in the 12th Century BC. Why the 12th Century? Because that’s the date you get from the calculations of lifetimes and years in the Biblical record. However, if we adjust our math, and allow for Abraham to live “in Egypt” whilst in Canaan (which is possible because Egypt did project its power over the region), then we’re not stuck with the 12th Century, and we can look earlier for an Exodus-like scenario.

There is plenty of evidence that such a scenario might be found in the 15th Century BC. This was a time of massive upheaval and cities being sacked and rebuilt. Basically, the land of Canaan was caught between the competing super-powers of Egypt to the south and the Hittites to the north. Such regional instability would fit well with some of the statements in the Bible, such as the metaphorical “hornet” that God sends ahead of his conquering people (Exodus 23:28, Deuteronomy 7:20, Joshua 24:12) and the sense that the conquering Hebrews are God’s judgment on a violent and lawless people (see Genesis 15:14-16).

Then, there is the etymology of the word “Hebrew”. It is possibly derived from the Egyptian “Apiru”, which means “wanderer” or “vagabond”. Could it be that the chosen nation was not an established earthly kingdom, like Egypt, but a bunch of displaced refugees, who wandered in from the desert and found a home under YHWH’s protection and reign? I find that tidbits like these actually help my theology come to life.

In these cases, the archaeology challenges our perceptions of the Exodus story, but I believe that if we allow the archaeology to speak to the text, and for the text to speak to the archaeology, we have a better chance of building up a true picture of what the archaeology and the text are about.

But what do we make of the opening chapters of Genesis – the stories before Abraham? My personal view is that these are mythological, in the sense that they could have been co-opted from neighboring cultures, though they might have arisen from real, historic events.

The flood account in Genesis 6:9-9:17, is an instructive example, because the story-line shares so much with the Gilgamesh Epic. Returning to my earlier comments about inferences, I find it fascinating to see how the theology of Genesis varies so profoundly with Gilgamesh. The God of Genesis could not be more different that the “gods” of Gilgamesh, and that, I believe, is it’s true message, whether it was written before Gilgamesh, or not.  

Conclusion

There is much, much more that I could possibly relate here. In short, I believe that the Biblical narrative was derived mostly from actual historic events, which are attested to by the extra-Biblical archaeological evidence. The New Testament, being comparatively modern, has good attestation; the Old Testament is mixed; some parts have good attestation, some don't. The Old Testament might well have been redacted under Josiah, but one has to ask if they were doing what we are doing now – taking what they can see and inferring what they can from it.

The irony is that though the origins of the Biblical stories are sometimes obscure, we can see the agenda that the authors (or redactors) had when they committed their knowledge to writing. I believe that if we truly intend to treat the Bible as the Word of God, we need to listen to that agenda because that is the light that will make our paths straight, as the Book of Proverbs promises. The archaeological evidence, I believe, informs our understanding of this agenda and helps bring it to life. As I said at the start, we would be wise to listen to the archaeology, but discerning in what we get from it.