In a new discovery, Israeli archeologists have managed to verify biblical stories of Egyptian, Aramaic, Assyrian and Babylonian conquests against the kingdoms of Judah in Israel by measuring the direction and intensity of the Earth's magnetic field.
Academics from The Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem joint forces on the special project, led by 20 researchers from Israel and the other countries.
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Archaeological findings with measurements of the Earth's magnetic field
(Photo: Yoav Vaknin)
The researchers managed to date 21 layers of destruction at 17 archaeological sites in Israel. The findings of the study revealed that the army of King Hazael of Damascus, aside from destroying the Gath of the Philistines city, also demolished Tel Rahov, Tel Zayit and Horvat Tevet - as archaeologists had inferred.
However, the project also contradicted a common archaeological assessment that Hazael destroyed Tel Beit She'an, which turned out not to be the case.
The study was published on Monday in the prestigious academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). This project is based on the doctoral thesis of Yoav Vaknin, under the supervision of Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef and Prof. Oded Lifshitz of the Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Prof. Ron Sha'ar from the Department of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The researchers explained that in order to understand the mechanism that generates the Earth's magnetic field, geophysicists tried to trace the changes in the field throughout history. For this purpose, they used archaeological findings that contain magnetic minerals that when heated can record the field's direction and intensity.
In 2020, the researchers succeeded at measuring the magnetic field as it was on the 9th of the Hebrew month Av, 586 BC, by examining a building that was destroyed in a fire by Nebuchadnezzar II and the Babylonian army in Jerusalem.
And now, thanks to the new archeological findings, and historic information based on ancient inscriptions and biblical descriptions, researchers were able to piece together the Earth's magnetic field as recorded in 21 layers of destruction - discovering a new reliable information source.
"The question of what the last days of the Judah Kingdoms looked like is an open-ended question in the research," Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef said. "Based on the archaeological findings, researchers predicted that the destruction of the Babylonians was not absolute in different areas in Israel, and simultaneous to the destruction of Jerusalem and the border cities in the Judean Foothills, settlements in the Negev, the southern Judean Hills, and the southern Judean Foothills continued to exist almost unchanged."
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Archaeological findings with measurements of the Earth's magnetic field
(Photo: Yoav Vaknin)
"The magnetic findings hint that the Babylonians were not the only ones responsible for total destruction: Decades after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple, the settlements in the Negev, and likely also other areas, that were not destroyed in the Babylonian era, were probably destroyed by the Edomites who took advantage of the fall of Jerusalem."
According to the bible, the Edomites first established a kingdom ("Edom") in the southern area of modern-day Jordan and later migrated into the southern parts of the Kingdom of Judah when Judah was weakened and later destroyed by the Babylonians in the 6th century BC.
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A map of the conquest against the Judah kingdoms, based on the findings
(Illustration: Itamar Ben Ezra)
"The new tool is unique in that it is based on magnetic information from a number of sites, whose exact date of destruction is known from historical sources," Prof. Oded Lifshitz said.
"The combination of accurate historic information with archaeological research allows us to apply the magnetic method to create a reliable chronology."