No Late Bronze Age Occupation at Tell Bleibel?

Tall Bleibel (Tall Bleibil or Bulaybil) is the small hill in the foreground (Coordinates:   31°54'31"N   35°38'19"E). It is located on the north side of the road that descends to the Jordan Valley in the Wadi Shuʿaib connects the southern Jordan Valley with the Transjordanian highlands near the modern city of as-Salt and Amman.
     It is an archaeological site that has been identified by some archaeologists with Zeboiim north, one of the cities of the Plain in Genesis 10:19; 14:2 (see also Deut. 29:23; Hos. 11:8). [1]  Zeboiim in Hebrew is plural (..im) and there is another small site called Tall Mustah (not shown), possibly the southern of the two Zeboiim sites, located ca. 500 m from Tall Bleibel on the south side of the road that descends from the highland plateau. Today an army post is located at the site of Tall Mustah and unlikely to be ever excavated.
 
     For Tall Bleibel to be one of the Cities of the Plain there should not be any occupation after it is destroyed for a long period of time. Three other sites that have been identified with the other Cities of the Plain (Tall el-Hammam=Sodom; Tall Kefrein=Gomorrah; Tall Nimrin=Admah) and have a Middle Bronze age (time of Abraham and Lot) destruction with no Late Bronze occupation and then an Iron Age resettlement. (There are several possibilities for Zoar but it was not destroyed so should not have this archaeological footprint). This destruction footprint has been confirmed by excavations at these sites, but until recently Tall Bleibel had only been confirmed by surface surveys by me and others. [2]
 

Author pointing to the Roman aqueduct at Tall Bleibel (2007)

     While Glueck [3] and the 1975/76 Valley Survey team did not identify any MB pottery at Tall Bleibel, they “identified EB I, II and III pottery, as well as a few late Bronze Age and Byzantine sherds.” [4] Others have identified a few EB sherds, along with MB, IA II, Persian, and Hellenistic sherds, but no LB pottery was identified at the site in any of the surface surveys.[5]
Collins reported:

A cursory reading of the sherds at both sites [Bleibel and Mustah] confirmed what I already knew from previous sherding and survey activity. However, there was more surface pottery evidence of a Bronze Age presence at Tall Mustah and Tall Bleibel than pre-excavation analysis had revealed for Tall Nimrin, and Tall Nimrin turned out to contain the ruins of a major MB fortified city. [6]

Roman aqueduct exposed by
night diggers at Tall Bleibel
(2007)

    As early as 2014, I published my book Key Facts for the Location of Sodom Student Edition: Navigating the Maze of Arguments and reported that there was no Late Bronze age architectural occupation at a site called Tall Bleibel (Tall Bleibil or Bulaybil) [7]. In 2018 I stated “This has been confirmed by the author however until Tall Bleibel and Tall el-Musṭāḥ are excavated there will be no official publication to verify the findings.” [8]
 
Well since then, Alexander Ahrens, a Senior Researcher at the Damascus Branch of the German Archaeological Institute’s Orient Department, has led the on-going archaeological survey project and the excavations at Tell Bleibil in collaboration with the Department of Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the Archaeological Museum of as-Salt (Balqa Governorate). In a recent article by Ahrens in ASOR [9] Ahrens reports that “The site is sometimes identified with Biblical Beth-Nimrah, although proof of this is still lacking. The excavations have revealed an Iron Age occupation of the site, c. 1000−600 BCE, below massive Roman-Byzantine occupational levels, and with older Bronze Age remains present as well” [10]

   While this report does not indicate which period of the Bronze Age (Early or Middle) was found, elsewhere Ahrens reports that “older levels dated to the Early and Late Bronze Ages so far only attested in the pottery assemblage collected at the site during the survey.” [11] In his 2016 dig report to the ADAJ, Ahrens reports that the LBA is based on the discovery of a single pottery rim.

One important find of the 2016 campaign was the discovery of a rim fragment of the distinctive Cypriot White Slip Ware II bowl (WS II; the so-called “milk bowl” from the Late Bronze Age IB–IIB; Fig. 20) at this site, which thus far was believed to be devoid of Late Bronze Age occupation. . . The fragment belongs to the most common and popular form of this distinctive pottery type, i.e. the hemispherical bowl with “wishbone” handle (not preserved), which is characterized by a thick white slip and brownish vertical and horizontal bands of paint, with a net pattern in between. This unexpected find may close the apparent occupational gap in the region. Tall Nimrin/WS-008 (located ca. 1500 m south-west of Tall Blaibil, see below) features Middle Bronze Age IIB/IIC (or MB III) occupation, followed by Iron Age I and II remains with a hiatus in between these two periods, whereas Tall Blaibil was thought to feature Early Bronze Age remains, directly followed by Iron Age remains. [12]

     However, the foreign import of Cypriot pottery, particularly White Painted, White Slip and Base Ring wares, to the Levant and Egypt increased from the end of the Middle Bronze age and into the beginning of the Late Bronze age. [13] So, the presence of Cypriot White Slip Ware II does not automatically indicate the LBA and one piece of pottery does not indicate an occupation of the site in the LBA.


     Now that the site of Bleibel is being excavated future dig reports and publications will provide some of the missing information needed for the potential identification of Bleibel as one of the Cities of the Plain. 

Copyright 2017 David E. Graves

Footnotes

[1] Steven Collins, “Explorations on the Eastern Jordan Disk,” Biblical Research Bulletin 2, no. 18 (2002): 22–23.
[2] David E. Graves, The Location of Sodom: Color Edition. Key Facts for Navigating the Maze of Arguments for the Location of the Cities of the Plain (Toronto: Electronic Christian Media, 2018).
[3] Nelson Glueck, Explorations in Eastern Palestine II, AASOR 15 (New Haven, CT: ASOR, 1935), 371; Nelson Glueck, “Some Ancient Towns in the Plains of Moab,” BASOR 91 (1943): 12.
[4] Rami G. Khouri, Antiquities of the Jordan Rift Valley (Manchester, MI: Solipsist, 1988), 73; Khair Yassine, Moawiyah M. Ibrahim, and James A. Sauer, “The East Jordan Valley Survey 1975 (Part Two),” in The Archaeology of Jordan: Essays and Reports, ed. Khair Yassine (Amman: Department of Archaeology, University of Jordan, 1988),  197.
[5] C. Ji Chang-Ho and Jong-Keun Lee, “The Survey in the Regions of ‘Irāq al-Amīr and Wādī al-Kafrayn,” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 49 (2002): 187.
[6]  Collins, “Explorations,” 22–23.
[7]  David E. Graves, Key Facts for the Location of Sodom Student Edition: Navigating the Maze of Arguments (Moncton, NB: Graves, 2014), 114.
[8]  David E. Graves, The Location of Sodom: Color Edition. Key Facts for Navigating the Maze of Arguments for the Location of the Cities of the Plain (Toronto: Electronic Christian Media, 2018), 131.
[9] Alexander Ahrens, “From the Southern Jordan Valley Plains to the Transjordanian Plateau: Current Archaeological Fieldwork in the Wadi Shuʿaib, Jordan,” ASOR: The Ancient Near East Today 7, no. 10 (October 2019).
[10]  ibid.
[11]  Alexander Ahrens, “Wadi Shuʿaib Archaeological Survey Project 2016–2017,” Archaeology in Jordan Newsletter: ACOR, 2018, 38.
[12] Alexander Ahrens, “From the Jordan Valley Lowlands to the Transjordanian Highlands: Preliminary Report of the Wadi Shuʿayb Archaeological Survey Project 2016,” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 59 (2016): 640-641.
[13] Laura Ann Campbell Gagné, “Middle Cypriot White Painted Ware: A Study of Pottery Production and Distribution in Middle Bronze Age Cyprus” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2012), 30; Louise C. Maguire, “The Circulation of Cypriot Pottery in the Middle Bronze Age” (Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 1990); Louise C Maguire, Tell El-Dabʻa XXI: The Cypriot Pottery and Its Circulation in the Levant, Untersuchungen Der Zweigstelle Kairo Des Österreichischen Archäologischen Institutes 33 (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, OAW, 2009)
 

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Updated Feb 9, 2022