gibeon: lucky strike

The Bible as history. As a document of historical fact, it has never been contradicted by the evidence to this point…

The Pool of Gibeon became, quite reasonably, a prize of the archaeologist’s seeking; something akin to the white tiger or the black rhino, except even more elusive. Its location had escaped the memories of humankind for many centuries, and the search itself was an ancient one. An early Palestinian historian, Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in the fourth century A.D., had suggested in his famous Onomasticon that Biblical Gibeon was four miles west of Bethel, and the current Arabic village of el-Bireh. One argues reluctantly with the Bishop of Caesarea, who lived about sixteen hundred years nearer to the Biblical period, but the great American scholar Edward Robinson did so, and suggested that a liklier site was the village of el-Jib, north of Jerusalem.

—After Saul’s death, David went to Hebron and was set up as king by the children ofJudah. Meanwhile, Abner set up Saul’s son, Ishbosheth, as king over all Israel. David’s and Ishbosheth’s generals met at the Pool of Gibeon for the first face-off of many battles that ultimately ended with David assuming the kingship of both Judah and Israel. According to the Bible, then, such a pool existed in the lifetime of David (~1000 BC). Jeremiah spoke of the same pool some 400 years later.
In 1956 the Pool of Gibeon was discovered six miles north of Jerusalem. A tunnel runs from the pool to Jerusalem. It is an astonishing 80 feet deep, and was dug sometime before 1000 BC. The immense size of the pool can be seen from the photograph above (see the tiny people in the upper right corner?) and below.
Significance:
It confirms the Biblical detail about the pool’s existence in David’s day.
—click image for source…

In the late 1950′s, James Pritchard and his colleagues determined to test the correctness of this thesis by conducting excavations on the site of the village of el-Jib- and their soundings struck gold, the gold of history. On the handle of wine jars they came upon that most unusual of all archaeological finds- the actual name of the ancient town. The jars had been fashioned for the export of the locally produced Gibeon wine.

To cap the climax, these modern day Indiana Jones’s discovered and re-opened the “pool of Gibeon.” It was thirty six feet in diameter at the top and 35 feet deep, with a spiral staircase leading downward around the inside face of the pool. And all of it had been carved out of solid rock. When they got to the bottom of the staircase, the excavators found and cleared out a tunnel which curved downward for 49 feet more until it reached a chamber where a pool of water collects. That point is 84 feet below the top of the hill on which ancient Gibeon once stood.