“No one argues that Jerusalem was fortified in the 8th century BCE” Garfinkel says. “Even in the 9th century BCE there were big cities in Eretz Yisrael. But were there fortified cities in Judea even earlier during the 10th century BCE the time of David’s reign?”

Tanach tells us that this process of urbanization occurred during the time of David at about 1000 BCE. But secular archaeologists who deliberately reject the biblical account and refer to themselves as “Minimalists” claimed that it occurred 300 years later during the time of Chizkiyahu. “At Khirbet Qeiyafa archaeology begins to support the biblical position which is why it’s so important.”

A Weighty Argument

Our tour of Khirbet Qeiyafa begins at a city gate or at least what’s left of it. To the untrained eye which probably includes the eyes of most people it’s just a collection of stones. It takes someone like Garfinkel — or Yehuda Kaplan one of the curators of the Bible Lands Museum exhibition who also accompanies us on the tour — to transform the rubble into the scene that would have greeted a visitor to this once-thriving town.

“The city gate was very monumental architecture” Garfinkel explains. “In fact it’s the most monumental architecture from the Iron Age that we have in Israel. The stones weigh up to eight tons. If you go to Megiddo or Chazor or Be’er Sheva which are a few hundred years later the stones are not as big.”

The surrounding city walls once stood some nine feet high and were built in the casemate style — two parallel walls of equal size flanking a hollow space between them which was also used in defense of the city during wartime. It was a formidable structure and the walls and gate provided the archaeologists with their first clue.

“Such a fortification wasn’t built by simple peasants” Kaplan comments. “This building activity was done by a powerful authority. Even if we don’t mention any names this could only have been done by someone who had the authority to tell people they had to build the fortifications.”

In other words, the walls suggest there was a king behind their building. But Khirbet Qeiyafa sits on the border between Philistine and Judea. What evidence is there that points to a Judean king as opposed to a Philistine monarch?

The two archaeologists point to yet another interesting feature about the casemate walls: The houses come right up to the walls. In fact, they posit that during peaceful times, people used the space between the inner and outer walls as bedrooms. This idea of building right up to the casemate wall is found in only four other cities, which are all located in Judea.

You’ve Got Mail!

But, as Garfinkel himself admits, you can’t prove a historical date from stones, which are usually used over and over again; therefore, from a secular archaeologist’s point of view, you can’t prove from a fortified wall that David’s kingdom existed. They need facts on the ground that can be verified, either by carbon dating or by confirmation from another reputable source.

Also, a kingdom needs writings. It needs a high level of communication. For instance, officials need to be able to send orders from place to place. Yet no Hebrew inscriptions had been found dating back to the 10th century BCE.

But in 2008, Garfinkel and his team uncovered a major find that shook the archaeological community: the first ostracon — pottery shard written upon with ink — that dates back to the 10th century BCE. Then they found a second one. Then a third one was found in Beit Shemesh, which was followed by the discovery of a fourth ostracon in Jerusalem.

“They’re written in proto-Canaanite script, but the language is Hebrew,” says Kaplan. “If it’s Hebrew, it takes us to Judea.”

The two ostracons found at Khirbet Qeiyafa are on display at the Bible Lands Museum, though they have yet to be fully deciphered, since many of the letters have faded.

Knockout Punch

There is an item in the exhibition that was not found at Khirbet Qeiyafa, but which provides irrefutable proof for the existence of David’s kingdom: the Tel Dan stele.

A stele is an inscribed stone. Why is the one found at Tel Dan so important?

In 1992 Professor Avraham Biran, the first PhD student of Professor Albright, discovered the first fragment of the Tel Dan stele. In 1993 another two fragments were found. While the top and bottom of the inscription are still missing, the middle rows contain these intriguing words: “I killed 70 kings. I killed a king of Israel and a king from Beit David.”

The ruler doing the bragging is King Hazael, the king of Aram-Damascus during the 9th century BCE. But what does it mean by Beit David?

If you were to ask a room full of kids in your nearby cheder, they would cheerfully exclaim it refers to the royal house founded by King David. And what’s the big deal? But when the stele was found, it shocked the world. This was the first time the name “David” and the term “House of David” appeared in an inscription—in something outside the Bible.

“This posed a major difficulty for the Minimalists,” Garfinkel comments. “According to their own methodology, you can only rely on an outside source — and here we had one that explicitly mentioned the House of David.

“First, they claimed the stele was a forgery. But that was dismissed because the stele came from an archaeological excavation. It didn’t suddenly appear on the antiquities market. You can’t just prefer your theory over data. They were finally forced to accept that the reference is to a king from the dynasty of David.”

Pit Stop

Like many Israeli archaeologists, Yosef Garfinkel exudes confidence. As he expands upon his theory as to why Khirbet Qeiyafa can conclusively be dated to King David’s time, it’s hard not to fall under his spell. He’s so sure. The evidence is so compelling. How could anyone possibly disagree?

Yet extreme confidence seems to be a common trait among archaeologists, and Garfinkel admits that it’s hard for people in his field to discard a pet theory, even when the facts prove them conclusively wrong. Therefore, when secular archaeologists who deny the truth and historicity of the Torah were forced into retreat, a new one arose in the form of Israel Finkelstein from Tel Aviv University, who in 1996 came up with what he called the chronology paradigm.

“He said, okay, there was someone named David, but maybe he was just a sheik, a shepherd, living in a tent in a small village named Jerusalem,” Garfinkel comments. “After all, when did the process of urbanization take place? According to Finkelstein, in the Northern Kingdom of Israel it happened in the middle of the 9th century BCE. In Judea it only happened during the time of Chizkiyahu, 300 years later.”

What delivered a knockout blow to this theory was a small, innocuous weapon found at Kirbhet Qeiyafa worthy of an academic battle over King David’s historicity: olive pits.

“We found 23 olive pits in various parts of the city that were burnt, and sent them to a laboratory at Oxford University for dating,” Garfinkel explains. “About six months later, we got back the results: The earliest were from about 1020 BCE, and the latest were from the beginning of the 10th century, around 980 or 970 BCE. This proved that already by 1000 BCE there were fortified cities in Israel. This was the first time in the history of archaeology that we found a fortified city in Judea from the time of King David.

“If it’s true that Israel began to move from an agrarian society to an urban one with fortified cities at this time, then you can no longer claim that urbanization in Judea only began in the 700s BCE. The olive pits destroyed Finkelstein’s chronology.”

The Plot Thickens

Garfinkel found other artifacts to support his theory that Khirbet Qeiyafa was a Judean city from King David’s time.

Among the hundreds of thousands of animal bones they found, they didn’t find a single pig bone; at a Philistine site, up to 20 percent of the animal bones came from pigs, while at a Canaanite site the range is 4 to 5 percent. “So the people’s diet doesn’t fit what we know about the Philistine or Canaanite population,” he comments.

The pottery found at the site is simple in design and has little variety, suggesting an earlier Iron-Age dating, rather than a later one. They also did not find any animal or human-shaped figurines, as are found at Philistine and Canaanite sites.

“When you compare the material culture to Philistine or Canaanite sites, it doesn’t match,” Garfinkel says. “But it does match what we know about the other sites in Judea. This is why we say it’s a Judean site.”

Yet the site still presents a big puzzle: What was its biblical name? Khirbet Qeiyafa, as the site is called today, is Arabic. “Khirbet” means a “ruin” or a “ruin on a hill,” similar to the Hebrew word tel. No one, though, knows what “Qeiyafa” means. But the discovery of a second city gate has suggested to Garfinkel that he may have found a city mentioned in Shmuel I.

“It’s a mystery why a small city like Khirbet Qeiyafa has two gates,” Garfinkel admits. “But what’s interesting is that the Bible tells us that after David killed Goliath, the Philistines fled to Gath and Ekron ‘along the way of Sha’arayim.’ Sha’aryim means two gates. Khirbet Qeiyafa could be Sha’arayim.”

Garfinkel stopped excavating the site in 2013. It’s common for archaeologists to excavate only a small portion of a site, thereby giving later archaeologists a chance to make their own discoveries, using more advanced technology. Garfinkel had yet another reason for finishing the dig.

“I think the cleverest thing we did was to stop excavating after seven years. In the beginning, there were publications that rejected our articles because it was too much for them to accept. Today, people are starting to accept what we found. They needed time to digest the news.”

Perhaps in the future archaeologists will discover what happened to Khirbet Qeiyafa, which existed for only 30 or 40 years before it was destroyed. According to Garfinkel and Kaplan, they know the city came to a violent end because they found a lot of broken pottery and, of course, the burnt olive pits. They also found weapons and metal tools that had been left in gutters; according to Kaplan, this suggests the fleeing people hoped they might be able to come back to their homes and retrieve them. “When you’re fleeing, you can’t take everything with you,” he comments.

But who destroyed Khirbet Qeiyafa and why?

“We can only guess,” Garfinkel says.

Yet if we still don’t know a great deal about Khirbet Qeiyafa’s past, we do know something about its future. According to Garfinkel, there are plans to turn the site and portions of the nearby Valley of Elah into a national park. Who knows what discoveries the future will bring?

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 633)