the searchers: quest for the gold of ophir

The Bible beckons excitedly to many new sites for archaeological exploration in the Holy Land and all of the ancient Near East. We would still like to know more about the Philistines, who loom so large in the Bible and who disappeared so completely from history. The Philistines were one of the sea peoples who reared the high civilization of Crete and the neighboring islands.

---View from Southwest, ca. 1915 Photo from the Jerusalem volume of the American Colony and Eric Matson Collection/Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-matpc-05424.---click image for source...

—View from Southwest, ca. 1915
Photo from the Jerusalem volume of the American Colony and Eric Matson Collection/Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-matpc-05424.—click image for source…

In the times of turmoil that destroyed the balance of powers in the Near East during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., they erupted into Asia Minor, overthrew the Hittite empire, challenged Egypt, and finally established themselves in Canaan, whose fertile land they long contested with the Israelites. The struggle was close and the nearness of Philistine victory, which would so greatly have changed world history, is recorded in the name they bequeathed to the land they failed to conquer-Palestine. Fragments of pottery have provided the only material clues to the Philistines’ Greek origin, but their cities still lie buried on the Canaan coast, promising rich rewards one day.

Temple Mount. Eric Matson Collection. click image for source...

Temple Mount. Eric Matson Collection. click image for source…

Who will find the gold mines of Ophir? We know from the Bible that Solomon’s ships trading out of Ezion-geber sailed down the eastern arm of the Red Sea. “And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents and brought it to King Solomon” ( I Kings). But Ophir remains a mystery. It could have been in Southwestern Arabia called “Mahad Dhahab” known as the Cradle of Gold, which may have been worked as early as Solomon’s times. Its ancient dump heaps yielded profitable sums of gold when treated in more modern times.

But it does not seem necessary to go very far afield to find treasures of high importance for our increased understanding of the backgrounds of the Bible. Despite all the archaeological work done in the Holy Land proper, there is still vastly more to be undertaken. Phoenician temples and inscriptions await discovery, as well as more complete remains of the Hittites, whose origins and culture and language still remain for the most part a mystery to us. Abraham had already had dealing with them in the second millenium B.C. when he purchased the Cave of the Machpelah in Hebron from them for a burial place.

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