Stepped Stone Structure

Three Excavations, Sixty Years Apart

The structure is a mantle of stones laid in courses down the steep eastern slope of the City of David ridge, rising about eighteen metres, supported by a substructure of stone-filled terraces. It is the largest Iron Age construction still standing anywhere in Jerusalem, and no one has excavated all of it.

R. Macalister and J. Duncan dug the top of it in the 1920s for the Palestine Exploration Fund, called it a ramp, and assigned it to the Jebusites — the pre-Israelite inhabitants — on the assumption that anything that massive on that ridge must be the citadel David captured. K. Kenyon dug a deep trench through the slope in the 1960s and reached a different answer: the structure belonged to the beginning of Iron Age II, around 1000 to 900 BC, which put it in the era of David and Solomon rather than before it. Y. Shiloh's excavation between 1978 and 1985 worked the largest exposure yet and distinguished two things that had been treated as one — an earlier system of stone-filled terraces, and a later stone mantle laid over them — with the terracing older than the mantle.

That layered picture is the reason the argument has lasted. It is not one wall of one date. It is a slope engineered repeatedly over centuries, with each phase using and burying the last, and the deep cuts needed to date the bottom were made before modern sampling methods existed.

The Millo Question

The Hebrew Bible has a word for a construction in this part of Jerusalem whose meaning nobody is certain of: ha-Millo, from a root meaning "to fill". 2 Samuel 5:9 says David lived in the stronghold, called it David's city, and built "around from Millo and inward". Solomon builds the Millo in 1 Kings 9:15 and again in 1 Kings 11:27, where the same verse says he repaired the breach of his father's city. Hezekiah strengthens the Millo in 2 Chronicles 32:5 as part of the same emergency that produced the tunnel.

A stone-filled terrace system supporting a slope is a good candidate for something called "the fill", and the identification has been made by the excavators themselves — K. Kenyon and Y. Shiloh both proposed it, and E. Mazar worked with it. It fits the word, it fits the location, and it fits a structure that was evidently built up and repaired more than once. It is not proven and it cannot be: the biblical texts give no dimensions and no location precise enough to test, and no inscription attaches the name to these stones. The app therefore states it as a proposal made by the people who dug the structure, and not as a finding.

Whatever it is called, the structure carries one thing on its own. Terracing and mantling a slope on this scale requires organised labour, planning, and a reason. Somebody in Iron Age Jerusalem could command that, which is a statement about the city's political weight and is independent of every argument about which century it happened in.

Where the Readings Disagree

The disagreement is real and it is not between believers and sceptics. R. Macalister put it before David; K. Kenyon put it at the start of the tenth century; Y. Shiloh separated an earlier terrace system, which he took back into the Late Bronze or early Iron Age, from a mantle he placed in Iron I or early Iron II. E. Mazar, excavating above it after 2005, treated the mantle as the support of a tenth-century royal building and read the whole as one complex.

Against that stands the Tel Aviv University reading. I. Finkelstein, L. Singer-Avitz, Z. Herzog and D. Ussishkin argued in 2007 that most of the walls in this area belong not to the Iron Age at all but to Hellenistic buildings that R. Macalister and J. Duncan had already uncovered in the 1920s and misdated. If they are right, part of what is shown to visitors as tenth-century Jerusalem is centuries younger than the label. M. Steiner, who published K. Kenyon's Jerusalem material, reports that argument and adds one of her own that bears on it: most of this ground had been dug before, by Macalister and Duncan and then by Kenyon, which she says makes it almost impossible to establish how the walls connect or to date them. Her own position on this structure follows Kenyon rather than Finkelstein — the credit belongs where it is put here, because handing one scholar another's argument is a factual error about a living person's views and the app treats it as one.

The honest summary is this. That there is monumental Iron Age engineering on this slope is not in dispute by anyone. Its earliest phase is probably pre-monarchic or early monarchic. Its latest phase may be very much later. Which courses belong to which phase cannot presently be settled, because the excavations that would settle it were dug in the 1920s and 1960s to standards that did not record what would now be needed, and the structure cannot be dismantled to check. A reader should hold the phrase "the largest Iron Age structure in Jerusalem" firmly and the phrase "David's citadel" loosely.

Scripture references

• 2 Samuel 5:6-9 — David takes the stronghold of Zion and builds "around from Millo and inward"
• 1 Kings 9:15 — Solomon's levy builds the Millo and Jerusalem's wall
• 1 Kings 11:27 — Solomon builds Millo and repairs the breach of his father's city
• 2 Chronicles 32:5 — Hezekiah strengthens Millo in David's city

Sources

• Holding institutionPalestine Exploration Fund — The Palestine Exploration Fund · Sponsor of the 1920s Ophel excavation by R. Macalister and J. Duncan, the first to expose the top of the structureSupports: The first excavation and its sponsor
• ScholarshipM. Steiner, "The 'Palace of David' Reconsidered in the Light of Earlier Excavations" — Margreet L. Steiner, publisher of K. Kenyon's Jerusalem excavation material · The Bible and Interpretation, University of Arizona, September 2009. Freely readable. Reports the Tel Aviv 2007 argument and sets out the difficulty created by the earlier excavations on the same groundSupports: That the ground was dug before, and who originated the Hellenistic reading
• ScholarshipI. Finkelstein, L. Singer-Avitz, Z. Herzog and D. Ussishkin, "Has King David's Palace in Jerusalem been Found?" — Israel Finkelstein, Lily Singer-Avitz, Ze'ev Herzog and David Ussishkin, Tel Aviv University · Tel Aviv 34:2 (2007), 142-164, doi:10.1179/tav.2007.2007.2.142. The paper that argues most of the walls here are Hellenistic. Publisher paywall; record confirmed through Crossref · paywalledSupports: The Hellenistic reading of the upper walls, credited to the people who made it
• ScholarshipY. Shiloh, Excavations at the City of David I: 1978-1982 — Yigal Shiloh, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem · Qedem 19, Jerusalem, 1984 — the interim report distinguishing the terrace substructure from the stone mantle above it. The Area G pottery on which its dating rests is being published by J. Cahill West, who supervised the excavation of the structure. Print onlySupports: The two-element reading of the structure, and the Millo proposal
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Stepped Stone Structure

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Stepped Stone Structure
• M. Steiner, "The 'Palace of David' Reconsidered in the Light of Earlier Excavations" (Bible and Interpretation)

Reflect

Three careful people looked at the same stones and read three different centuries in them. Where have you mistaken a strong conviction for a settled fact?