Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period

Currents in Theology and Mission, June, 2005

Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period. Edited by Andrew G. Vaughn and Ann E. Killebrew (SBL, $49.95). The essays in this volume were presented over a four-year period at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Although Jerusalem has experienced many excavations in the last century and a half (the bibliography in this volume comes to fifty pages), there have also been severe limitations on where one can dig because the temple mount/Dome of the Rock area is ruled out for religious reasons and because people still live in other parts of the city of the First Temple period! Essays in this book represent a wide diversity of opinion on what all this digging proves.

Was Jerusalem during the reigns of David and Solomon the significant capital of the United Monarchy, or did it remain primarily a village until the ninth century? Jerusalem may have competed with the famous sites of Megiddo and Hazor in the tenth century, but it completely outshined them in the centuries to come. RWK