by
Damien F. Mackey
“The
archaeologists say the new finds might turn the interpretation of prebiblical history
on its head. The people of the time were pagans who had a very elaborate
religious system”.
J. Correspondent
Who may have been this female ruler considered by
Tel Aviv University archaeologists to have been a pagan Canaanite personage of
the mid-C14th BC?
First of all, let us read what the Israeli archaeologists
have had to say about the extraordinary find. On May 29, 2009, J. Correspondent
wrote about it at:
Tel Aviv University archaeologists have uncovered
evidence that a mysterious woman ruled the ancient town of Beit Shemesh when it
was part of Canaan around 1350 BCE, before the Exodus of the Israelites from
Egypt and their return to their homeland.
Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman of the
department of archaeology and ancient Near Eastern civilizations recently found
an unusual ceramic plaque of a goddess in female dress, suggesting that a
mighty female “king” may have ruled the city. If true, they say, the plaque
showed the only known female ruler of the region.
The plaque itself presents a royal, supposedly
male figure and deities that once appeared in Egyptian and Canaanite art. The
figure’s hairstyle, though, is feminine and its bent arms are holding lotus
flowers, which is uncharacteristic of men.
Art historians suggest that the plaque may be an
artistic representation of the “Mistress of the Lionesses,” a female Canaanite
ruler who was known to have sent letters to the Pharaoh in Egypt reporting
unrest in her kingdom and calling for help.
“We took the image to an art historian who
confirmed our hypothesis that the figure was a female,” says Lederman. “Obviously
something very different was happening in this city.
“We may have found the ‘Mistress of the
Lionesses’ who’d been sending letters from Canaan to Egypt. The destruction we
uncovered at the site last summer, along with the plaque, may just be the key
to the puzzle.”
Archaeologists dig
at an excavation site near where evidence was uncovered that a woman ruled the
ancient town of Beit Shemesh.
Around 1350 BCE, there was unrest in the region,
and Canaanite kings expressed their fears using clay tablet “letters” to the
Egyptian pharaoh, asking for military assistance. But among all the
correspondence by kings were two rare and unusual letters among the 382
el-Amarna tablets uncovered by Egyptian farmers a few decades ago.
The two letters came from a “Mistress of the
Lionesses” in Canaan. She wrote that groups of bandits and rebels had entered
the region and that her city might be endangered.
Because the el-Amarna tablets were found in Egypt
rather than Canaan, historians have tried to trace the origin of the tablets.
[End of quote]
Let us now put this exciting archaeological
find into some proper biblico-historical perspective.
The period of c. 1350 BC of these
Israeli archaeologists, supposedly “before the Exodus of the Israelites from
Egypt and their return to their homeland”, was actually - as Dr. I. Velikovsky
had shown in his Ages in Chaos series
- the era of the Divided Monarchy in Israel, roughly half a millennium after the Exodus.
It is right on the era of
pharaoh Akhnaton (c. 1351-1334 BC, conventional dating), it being
a part of the El Amarna [EA] period during which the “Mistress of the
Lionesses” (as referred to above) did indeed write at least two
of the letters belonging to the EA archive (EA 273 and 274). Now, this “Mistress
of the Lionesses”, Baalat-neše, can
only be queen Jezebel, I have argued in e.g.:
King Ahab in El Amarna
But can EA
correspondent Baalat-neše also be the
mysterious female ruler as referred to above?
I think
definitely no.
Baalat-neše (if Queen Jezebel), despite
her approximate contemporaneity with this supposed female ruler, was never -
despite the admittedly powerful influence that she undoubtedly exerted, even
over her king husband, Ahab - an actual king. Nor was the kingdom to which she
belonged, Israel, located in the south, in the region of Beth-Shemesh (“Beit
Shemesh”), which was of Judah.
The article continues,
asking:
The big question became, ‘What city did she rule?’
the researchers said.
Lederman and Bunimovitz believe that she served
as king (rather than queen, which at the time described the wife of a male
king) over a city of about 1,500 residents. A few years ago, Tel Aviv
University professor Nadav Naaman suggested that she might have ruled the city
of Beit Shemesh, but there has been no proof until now.
“The city had been violently destroyed in a way
we rarely see in archaeology,” says Bunimovitz, who points to many exotic finds
buried under the destruction, including an Egyptian royal seal, bronze
arrowheads and complete large storage vessels.
They suggest a large and important city-state,
well enmeshed within east Mediterranean geopolitical and economic networks.
The archaeologists say the new finds might turn
the interpretation of prebiblical history on its head. The people of the time
were pagans who had a very elaborate religious system.
[End of quote]
Beth-Shemesh is situated some 19
miles west of Jerusalem.
“Beit
Shemesh is a city in the Shfela region of Israel,
population 98000. Excluding the West Bank,
Beit Shemesh is the closest city to Jerusalem”:
https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Beit_Shemesh
In our revised context, which
would now re-locate this find, biblico-historically, to during the Divided
Kingdom period, the seat of rule would be, not Beth-Shemesh, but Jerusalem.
Thus the female “king”, if such
she be, would have ruled from Jerusalem.
There is only one possible candidate
for a female ruler in Jerusalem during the time when Judah as a kingdom was
divided from the kingdom of Israel in the north, and that is Queen Athaliah.
We read about her, for
instance, at:
where Athaliah is likened to
Margaret Thatcher:
Who was Athaliah, the wicked Queen?
Athaliah,
queen mother in the Bible,
was the most powerful woman in Judah. She was the only woman in the Bible to
have reigned as a monarch. She was eventually murdered ….
Athaliah – Bible queen’s struggle
for power
Who was Athaliah? Athaliah was probably the daughter of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, rulers of the rich northern kingdom of
Israel …. She was married at an early age to King
Joram [Jehoram] of the southern kingdom of Judah. The marriage cemented an alliance between the two
countries.
When
Joram died and her son Aziah [Ahaziah] became king, she became ‘Gebirah‘,
the highest-status woman in the kingdom. As the mother of the reigning king she out-ranked
any of the wives and concubines of her son, and was an extremely powerful
woman.
….
But her son Aziah only reigned for one
year. When he was 22 he was assassinated by
Jehu, who had usurped the throne of Israel.
At
the time, Aziah had been visiting his cousin Joram, king of the northern
kingdom. It was a perfect opportunity for Jehu to kill both of them together,
and seize Judah.
Aziah’s desperate flight
First, Jehu killed Joram. Then he wheeled his chariot around to
pursue Aziah. Aziah had seen Joram being murdered, and knew he was
outnumbered. He turned and raced his chariot away from the frightful scene.
There is a heartrending account of his
desperate flight up the hill towards safety in the fortress of Gur. He did not
make it. He was shot by arrows as he fled. He
later died at Megiddo.
Ancient ivory plaque with the
famous ‘Woman at the Window
On
that same day, Queen Jezebel was
killed, thrown down from a high balcony of the palace and smashed on the stones
of the courtyard. She was left to die there, and the dogs ate her body.
All of
Athaliah’s male relatives in Jezreel, capital city of Israel – the seventy boys
and young men in the royal family, were rounded up and beheaded. On Jehu’s orders their heads were
placed in baskets at the city gate.
Jehu
then herded forty-two of Athaliah’s adult male relatives into a pit and
slaughtered them at Betheked.
He had killed anyone in Israel and Judah who might be able to claim the thrones
of these kingdoms.
Athaliah takes command
Another tough ruling woman:
Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain.
But
there was one survivor: Athaliah.
Spared
because she was, after all, just a woman, she now took command of Judah – there were no surviving adult sons or
grandsons to do so – and became its queen.
Such
a thing had never been done before. Women might influence politics, but they had never ruled in their own right (Margaret
Thatcher’s power also outraged male politicians).
This
of course infuriated the Temple priests, who had supported Jehu’s double coup d’état and helped
plan it.
It’s
worth pointing out that these priests were the ones who later came to write and edit Judah’s history,
which is why Athaliah is portrayed as the greatest villainess of the Bible. ….
[End
of quote]
We read of some other very
interesting facts in the archaeological account above, namely that: “The city [Beth-Shemesh]
had been violently destroyed in a way we rarely see in archaeology”, and that
there were “… many exotic finds buried under the destruction, including an
Egyptian royal seal”.
Not long after the reign of
Queen Athaliah (and even much closer in my revision), the king of Israel
attacked Beth-Shemesh on his way to take Jerusalem (2 Kings 14:13): “Jehoash
king of Israel captured Amaziah king of Judah, the son of Joash, the son of
Ahaziah, at Beth Shemesh. Then Jehoash went to Jerusalem and broke down the
wall of Jerusalem from the Ephraim Gate to the Corner Gate--a section about
four hundred cubits long”.
This would most likely be the cause
of the violent destruction of Beth-Shemesh referred to above.
As for the “Egyptian royal seal”,
which was under the destruction level at Beth-Shemesh - and hence a bit earlier
- this belonged to pharaoh Amenhotep III, according to Baruch Brandl et al., “Beth-shemesh and Sellopoulo:
two commemorative scarabs of Amenhotep III and their contribution to Aegean
Chronology” (The Annual of the
British School at Athens, Vol. 108 (2013), pp. 67-95), corresponding archaeologically
with Late Minoan/Late Helladic IIII.
Pharaoh Amenhotep III was, of course, the father
of Amenhotep IV (or Akhnaton).
It all seems to be a pretty
good fit.
The same cannot be said, though, for the conventional interpretation of the
finds at Beth-Shemesh:
“It was a very well-to-do city,” says Lederman.
“Strangely, such extensive destruction like what we found in our most recent
dig is a great joy for archaeologists because people would not have had time to
take their belongings. They left everything in their houses. The site is loaded
with finds,” he says, adding that the expensive items found in the recent level
marks it as one the most important inland Canaanite cities.
The discovery of the plaque, and the evidence of
destruction recorded in the el-Amarna tablets, could confirm that the woman
depicted in the figurine was the mysterious “Mistress of the Lionesses” and
ruled Canaanite Beit Shemesh.
“There is no evidence of other females ruling a
major city in this capacity,” Lederman and Bunimovitz say. “She is the only
one. We really hope to find out more about her this summer.”
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