Remembering Adam Zertal

One Friday in October 2021, my wife and I attended a family celebration held at the biblical site of Shiloh. Our visit included a guided tour of the excavations, a hologram of the Mishkan (Tabernacle) and a multimedia presentation of Shiloh’s history. The items sold at the tourist shop included books and a series of DVD travelogues portraying Shiloh and other sites linked with biblical festivals and events. There was one book, however, that had a special meaning for me and which I was delighted to purchase.

Sisera’s Secret is a translation of Professor Adam Zertal’s Hebrew work, Sodo shel Sisera (“A Journey following the Sea Peoples and the Song of Deborah,” 2010). Nearly two decades ago, in an article published in the JBQ,¹ I had made several references to the author, an eminent Israeli archaeologist, but never read his original text, which obliged me to rely on secondhand source material. The fact that this English-language edition only appeared a year after the author’s death is certainly cause for regret.

Zertal’s Life and Achievements

Raised in Ein Shemer, a kibbutz affiliated with the Hashomer Hatzair movement, Adam Zertal (1936−2015) embraced its secular, left-wing ideology. The needs of his kibbutz led him to gain professional qualifications in economics and agriculture, but while serving as an engineering officer during the Yom Kippur War (1973) he was badly wounded. “I spent a year at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem,” he told a Jerusalem Post reporter, and during the rest of his life he managed to get around on crutches. Overcoming this disability after his release from hospital, Zertal decided to study archaeology at Tel Aviv University, a bastion of secular culture where, in line with the prevailing view, the biblical narrative was a historical mythology. “Although I had agreed that the Bible was full of myths,” he observed, “I decided after my recovery to travel through the land on foot to look for archaeological evidence.”

The fact that Israel had gained control of “archaeologically rich territory” in the aftermath of the Six-Day War (1967) presented an obvious challenge to archaeologists. As a result, Zertal participated in surveys conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority which identified hundreds of sites from the biblical period that had never previously been studied. He was destined to become Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Haifa. In 1980, during a three-decade survey covering the territory from Hadera in the north to Jericho in the south, he became certain that a collection of stones at Mount Ebal, near ancient Shechem (Nablus) in Samaria, was none other than the altar built by Joshua – as mentioned in the Torah (Deut. 27:4-6; cf. Josh. 8:30-31). “If this corroborates exactly what is written in that very old part of the Bible,” Zertal later declared (in the Smithsonian Magazine, 2006), “it means that probably other parts are historically correct.”²

Although many people in Israel welcomed Zertal’s stand, as a confirmation of the biblical narrative and a validation of Jewish ties to the Land of Israel, others (especially those known as “minimalists”) did not. Many members of the archaeological community, such as Professors Aharon Kempinski and Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, refused to accept his claims; Kempinski, for example, even dismissed them as “baseless.” Not everyone has adopted such a negative stand. Stephen Fine, a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University in New York, maintained that Zertal and his colleagues in Haifa still had an important role to play in Israeli culture, but feared that archaeology in Israel was “becoming sectarianized” and increasingly exploited by the opposing camps “to suit their ideological leanings.” The ongoing controversy left Zertal unmoved. On one occasion, in 2012, he declared, “If you don’t have enemies, you don’t exist… If everyone agrees with you, you are nothing.”³

Publications

Apart from Sisera’s Secret, to which we will return, Zertal published a few books and many more articles in various periodicals. Unfortunately, most English-language editions of his major works appeared after his death. The following items are listed in chronological order. (1) Seker Har Menashe (Israel Ministry of Defense/University of Haifa and other publishers), 4 volumes: 1992, 1996, 2005, 2112; English version entitled The Manasseh Hill Country Survey (Boston, Brill), 5 volumes: 2004, 2007, 2016-7, 2019); (2) Am Nolad: Mizbah Har Eval ve-Reshit Yisrael (Tel Aviv, Yediot Aharonot, 2005); English version entitled A Nation Born: The Altar on Mount Ebal and the Birth of Ancient Israel (Quebec: Ministère Multilingue International, 2016); (3) The Footsteps of God: The Discovery of an Israelite Gilgal Site Dating from the Iron Age (Israel: 2002). While the English edition of item 2 was reissued in Israel (2018), I have been unable to trace any original Hebrew edition of item 3, which may have been drawn from earlier published material.

Zertal’s major works, based on various excavations, received generally warm and unbiased reviews. Am Nolad, for example, was given a 5-star rating in a literary journal, Simaniyah (“Bookmark,” May 23, 2021). A reviewer contrasted the author’s treatment in academia and the media with the enthusiasm that his findings had aroused among both secular kibbutzniks and religious “settlers,” not to mention those dozens of Christian volunteers who arrived in Israel to help excavate his archaeological sites. Am Nolad, said the reviewer, was “a book written out of love for Eretz Yisrael, its landscapes and its people.”

Where Exactly Was Haroshet Ha-Goyyim?

As noted in my article, “Most authorities, whether archaeologists or Bible scholars, have tried to identify Haroshet ha-Goyyim, Sisera’s cavalry base, with a particular location in the Mount Carmel region. Some of their proposals are vague.”⁴ That was because they never bothered to investigate the topography, a fact emphasized by the supposedly authoritative maps illustrating events in the Book of Judges. However, following the discoveries made and published by Adam Zertal and his colleagues, a different picture has emerged. It now seems likely that Sisera’s headquarters were located further south, on a ridge near Katzir known in Arabic as El-Ahwat (“The Walls”), ten miles east of Caesarea in northwestern Samaria.⁵ A new map of the region illustrates this development. In his review of Zertal’s key article, Jeffrey P. Emanuel, Associate Director of Academic Technology and CHS Fellow in Aegean Archaeology & Prehistory at the University of Harvard, writes as follows:

The excavations at el-Ahwat constitute a unique and fascinating archaeological undertaking. The site is the location of a fortified city dated to the early Iron Age (ca. 1220-1150 BCE), hidden in a dense Mediterranean forest in central Israel, near the historic ’Arunah pass. Discovered in 1992 and excavated between 1993 and 2000, the digs revealed an urban “time capsule” erected and inhabited during a short period of time (60-70 years), with no earlier site below or subsequent one above it.

This report provides a vivid picture of the site, its buildings, and environmental economy as evinced by the stone artifacts, animal bones, agricultural installations, and iron forge that were uncovered here. The excavators of this site suggest in this work that the settlement was inhabited by the Shardana Sea-Peoples, who arrived in the ancient Near East at the end of the 13th century BCE and settled in northern Canaan. In weighing the physical evidence and the logic of the interpretation presented herein, the reader will be treated to a new and compelling archaeological and historical challenge.⁶

The Importance of This Book

A 303-page illustrated volume, Sisera’s Secret (Haifa, Seker Publishing, 2016) comprises 20 chapters dealing with a variety of inter-related topics. Introducing the main text are the Song of Deborah (quoted from the JPSA version of 1917), a list of archaeological and historical periods from 4500 BCE down to the present time, and the author’s introduction. Here he pays warm tribute to Professor Giovanni Ugas of the Sicilian University of Cagliari, together with all those who helped to excavate and publish reports concerning the El-Ahwat site. However, Zertal observes, some archaeologists “have questioned the historical reliability of the Bible,” and he had no wish to argue or disagree with them. That was not the purpose of this book. The author’s modus operandi, when excavating an ancient site, was to cross-check the relevant biblical text with “finds in the field.” If they matched what was written in the Bible, its reliability would be strengthened. If they did not, the researcher would face a dilemma and need to find a solution. For Adam Zertal, however, each site that he excavated represented “a new adventure.”⁷

Chapter 1 first sets the scene, linking the “Dark Period” between 1250-1000 BCE with the emergence of the Israelites and the writing of the Bible in a coastal area stretching north to south − from Alexandretta in modern Turkey all the way to El Alamein, west of the Nile delta.⁸ Chapter 2 deals with the ancient “Sea Route” (Via Maris) and the survey of ancient Samaria which led to his discovery of El-Ahwat on a “tangled Mediterranean thicket,” an area to which the Old Yishuv’s newspaper editor, Yoel Moshe Salomon, had actually referred (in Yehudah vi-Yerushalayim) after a tour of the district in 1878. A detailed description of the site’s excavation and the artifacts discovered there is provided in Chapters 3-8, followed by an account of El-Ahwat’s close connection with the Sea Peoples and the Shardana group’s origin in Sardinia (Chapters 9-15). Lastly, Zertal focuses his attention on the person of Sisera, the Goyyim from whom he had emerged, and Barak’s strategy in the historic battle against Sisera’s opposing forces (Chapters 16-20).

While serving as director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, William F. Albright traveled north along the coastal plain and as far as the Acre Valley. Although the Sea Peoples were not his main concern at the time, he wrote – “with a spark of prophecy” in 1923 – that Goyim was “a term applied to migrating hordes … [and] also to the migrating Sea Peoples, as in ‘Haroshet of the Nations’… a branch of the same people to which Sisera and his horde belonged.” Fully eight decades before Zertal, Albright had “laid down the rules” by recognizing Sisera as “leader of the Sea Peoples” (i.e., the Goyim). He thereby “connected both Sisera and Haroshet HaGoyim to the Sea Peoples and indirectly introduced both of them into the battle between the Canaanites and the Israelites described in the Book of Judges.”

Biblical Topography

Adam Zertal often makes use of biblical citations when endeavoring to reconcile such texts with “finds in the field” or to explain how problems were overcome in the course of his archaeological work. Here are some examples of this technique:

“According to the biblical text, Haroshet HaGoyim should be to the west of the site of the battle on the Kishon River.” While Sisera leads his chariot army and auxiliaries from Haroshet to the Kishon, Barak gathers his Israelite militia at Mount Tabor. From there he “descends” and “draws” the enemy to his chosen battleground near the Kishon (Judges 4:7, 14). Now the Hebrew verb mashakh (“draw”) has a particular significance here, since it can also mean “to pull the other way” or suggest “laying an ambush” (Judges 20:36-37). “Thus, if the Israelites started out from Mount Tabor and the opposing armies met at the Kishon River, between Taanach and Megiddo (Judges 5:19), Haroshet HaGoyim must have been somewhere in the mountains of ’Iron or Menashe, west or southwest of the battleground.” According to Zertal, “nearly all of the discussions about the location of Haroshet HaGoyim ignored this basic feature.”

He also points out that “Haroshet HaGoyim” is a combination that evidently applies to “a specific community or a known ethnic group” rather than to Goyim (“nations”) in general. Such compound names, Ur Kasdim [Ur of the Chaldees] and Aram Damesek [Aram of Damascus], for example, are not unusual in the Hebrew Bible. Two other place names, Goyyim la-Gilgal (Joshua 12:23) and Gelil ha-Goyyim (Isaiah 8:23), introduce a lengthy discussion in Chapter 18.

Solving a Great Mystery

A problem which the author obviously feels bound to tackle in his Epilogue concerns the fate of El-Ahwat, Sisera’s fortified military base. “It was,” Zertal declares, “permanently abandoned in the first decades of the twelfth century BCE. This apparently occurred close to the date of the great battle of Ramses III against the Sea Peoples (ca. 1180 BCE), or slightly later. The city was abandoned in an organized fashion: it was not burnt or destroyed. Most of the ceramic vessels and other objects were taken by the inhabitants when they left…”

Then why was El-Ahwat simply abandoned after all the effort that had been devoted to building it? The answer given by Zertal deals with ecological and other factors. “The location and fortifications indicate… that it was evidently built to guard a fragile border: the unseen line between the Sea Peoples, who had settled along the northern coast of Canaan, and the Israelites, who had settled in the rocky mountainous terrain. This could explain why the fortress of El-Ahwat was built – and why it was abandoned.” Once the Canaanite and Shardana chariots had been eliminated and their leader had been slain, there was no longer any point in maintaining the border fortress. Hence the motive for and timing of the site’s abandonment.

“The city itself was designed on a grand, virtually megalomaniacal scale. Aerial photographs taken before 1956 reveal a much larger site,” one that the founders planned to turn into “a huge city, almost without precedent in that era’s Middle East. It was intended to serve as the grand capital of whoever erected it.” A series of problems arose, however, chiefly the lack of a readily accessible water supply. Furthermore, access to the site was difficult, even though stone towers had been erected to deter hostile attack.

Nor should one overlook the danger posed by Israelite settlement in the region. The Shardana realized that these newcomers threatened their own settlements and their very survival. Unlike the Philistines, who would eventually build their cities inside or next to Canaanite townships and who utilized existing resources, the Shardana were content to build and inhabit small “ghettos” which could be destroyed by one military defeat – which was the fate in store for Christian crusaders in the Holy Land 2,200 years later. Meanwhile, the more numerous Israelite settlers created an “organic society” based on a religious ideology that held Canaan to be their ancestral Promised Land.

“Analysis of the [biblical] text in light of discoveries in the field shows that it was not rain and mud that destroyed Sisera’s army, but the Israelites taking advantage of the topography. That was the only way the unorganized tribal warriors could smite the chariots.” Though admittedly open to other interpretations, Adam Zertal’s “new theory of the battle, its circumstances and participants, is based on the layout of the land and the archaeological finds, not just on literary and linguistic analysis.” Deborah and Barak waged a momentous war of independence, “rose to greatness and became the nation’s guides.”

As Zertal states in his conclusion, “the Israelite victory over Sisera’s army was so important that the author of Judges dedicated two whole chapters to it.” Sisera, the vanquished warlord, perished and his capital – Haroshet ha-Goyyim − was evidently abandoned. The Shardana then “faded from the stage of history.”

Although some misprints and spelling mistakes do occur in this volume, they scarcely impede the flow of the text, which remains lucid and lively – often conveying the author’s own excitement over some discovery to the reader. Zertal was careful to state, in 2010, that his identification of El-Ahwat as Sisera’s base and residence had “not yet been definitely established.” Since then, as far as one can judge, there has been no serious challenge to his “hypothesis.”

Sisera’s Secret deserves our high regard as a monumental contribution to archaeological investigation and discovery in the Land of Israel − an enduring tribute to Adam Zertal’s unique, self-sacrificing life and labor. Yehi zikhro barukh!