The Timna Copper Mines

Also called Timna Valley

A district of ancient copper workings in the southern Arabah, called Solomon's mines, then reassigned to Egypt, then radiocarbon-dated back to the tenth century — and used to argue that the whole field reasons about nomads the wrong way.

Object: An ancient copper-mining and smelting district — shafts, galleries, smelting camps, slag mounds, an Egyptian temple and preserved textiles
Found at: The Timna valley, southern Arabah, north of the Gulf of Aqaba
Found in: Surveyed by N. Glueck in the 1930s; excavated by B. Rothenberg's Arabah Expedition from 1959; re-excavated from 2009, and as the Central Timna Valley Project from 2012
Found by: N. Glueck (survey); B. Rothenberg (Arabah Expedition); E. Ben-Yosef (Central Timna Valley Project, Tel Aviv University)
Dates from: Worked over a long span. The Hathor temple at Site 200 is New Kingdom Egyptian; the main Iron Age smelting camps are radiocarbon-dated to the eleventh to ninth centuries BC, with Site 34 in the late eleventh to early tenth
Now held at: Timna Park, southern Israel; finds are held by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority

Solomon's Mines, Then Not

The Timna valley, north of the Gulf of Aqaba in the southern Arabah, is riddled with ancient copper workings — shafts, galleries, smelting camps and slag heaps, thousands of them. N. Glueck's surveys of the 1930s tied the region's copper industry to the united monarchy, and it is his identification that fastened the phrase "King Solomon's mines" to the place; he set it out in print in 1940 and defended it for the rest of his life.

B. Rothenberg's Arabah Expedition began working the valley in 1959, and in 1969 it excavated Site 200 and found an Egyptian temple to the goddess Hathor. Cartouches in it ran from Seti I to Ramesses V, which put the workings in the New Kingdom, three centuries before Solomon. Rothenberg published Timna as an Egyptian operation, and the field moved. It is worth saying who conceded what: Glueck retracted his reading of the Tell el-Kheleifeh installation as a copper refinery in 1965, but he never accepted that the Arabah mines were pre-Solomonic, and he died in February 1971 still holding that position. It was W. F. Albright, shortly afterwards, who wrote that he and Glueck had both been wrong.

Then Not Egyptian Either

Renewed work from 2009, and from 2012 as the Central Timna Valley Project of Tel Aviv University under E. Ben-Yosef, dated the main smelting camps directly rather than by association with the Hathor sanctuary. The result moved them again. The project's own summary is that Site 30 now belongs to the early Iron Age, the eleventh to ninth centuries BC, and that the Egyptian paradigm for the valley's main sites is no longer valid. The great smelting camp at Site 34, the one nicknamed Slaves' Hill, is dated by radiocarbon to the late eleventh and early tenth centuries BC. The industry was at its peak, in other words, at exactly the period the Bible assigns to David and Solomon, and it was not being run by Egypt.

The desert also preserved things a wetter site would have destroyed. Textiles from the camps have been published by N. Sukenik, E. Ben-Yosef and colleagues in PLOS ONE — plant-dyed cloth in 2017, and in 2021 wool fibres carrying 6-monobromoindigotin and 6,6-dibromoindigotin, the chemical signature of murex-derived royal purple. They are the oldest such textiles known in the southern Levant, and they were worn by people living in tents. Note what they are and are not: this is argaman, royal purple, not the blue tekhelet of the tassel laws, and no identification of tekhelet at Timna has been published.

The Argument About Tents

The genuinely interesting thing at Timna is not a dating correction. It is a methodological challenge, and it deserves to be stated in its author's terms rather than in the form apologetics has given it. E. Ben-Yosef argues, in "The Architectural Bias in Current Biblical Archaeology" in Vetus Testamentum in 2019 and at length since, that the discipline reads social complexity off buildings, and that this systematically renders mobile societies invisible. The people running the Arabah copper industry were nomads. They left almost no architecture. They nevertheless operated a centralised, technologically sophisticated, industrial-scale enterprise, wore imported dyed textiles, and — because copper production happens to leave slag heaps and installations — they can be studied in a way nomads normally cannot. Timna is a rare window, not a normal case.

The inference he draws is narrow and he is careful about it, and the app is going to be careful too. He does not claim the Arabah proves anything about David or Solomon. His paper opens by saying that it "aims at highlighting a methodological flaw in current biblical archaeology", and it closes by asking "biblical archaeologists to be more modest about their role in solving textual issues". What his argument does is remove an argument. The standard case against a substantial tenth-century polity in Judah runs: no monumental architecture, therefore no state. If a tent-dwelling society can run what Timna shows it ran, that inference does not hold, and the absence of tenth-century palaces stops being decisive. Taking away an argument against something is not evidence for it. Ben-Yosef says so himself, and any presentation of him as an "archaeology proves the Bible" figure misrepresents him.

He also has serious opposition. I. Finkelstein has answered that the point is not new, that the desert polity is not in fact devoid of stone-built remains, that Tel Masos and the Negev Highlands settlements are part of the same system, and that there is no way to know whether these people called themselves Edom rather than Midian, Amalek or Teman. P. Bienkowski has argued in the Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research that the nomadic-polity model has no supporting evidence, that the people buried in the nearby cemetery were mostly not the people working the furnaces, and that the kingdom of Edom did not grow out of this industry at all. That exchange is live. Where the app stands: the redating is solid and the methodological point is a real contribution that ought to change how absence-of-evidence arguments are made in this field. Neither of those is a biblical confirmation, and the honest reading of Deuteronomy 8:9 is that the land was known for its copper, which the Arabah amply demonstrates, and not that any of these mines belonged to Solomon.

Scripture references

Deuteronomy 8:9 — "a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you may dig copper"
Numbers 31:22 — Copper among the metals Israel is expected to handle in the wilderness period
1 Kings 7:45-46 — Solomon's bronze vessels cast in the clay ground of the Jordan plain — not in the Arabah

Sources

Holding institutionThe Central Timna Valley Project — Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University; director E. Ben-Yosef · The excavating project's own site. "Site 30 is now dated to the early Iron Age (11th - 9th c. BCE)" and "the previously accepted 'Egyptian paradigm' ... is no longer valid"Supports: The redating of the smelting camps and the abandonment of the Egyptian paradigm
ScholarshipE. Ben-Yosef, R. Shaar, L. Tauxe and H. Ron, "A New Chronological Framework for Iron Age Copper Production at Timna (Israel)" — Erez Ben-Yosef, Ron Shaar, Lisa Tauxe and Hagai Ron · Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 367 (2012), 31-71. The dating framework behind the redating · paywalledSupports: The Iron Age dates for the Timna smelting camps
ScholarshipE. Ben-Yosef, "The Architectural Bias in Current Biblical Archaeology" — Erez Ben-Yosef, Tel Aviv University · Vetus Testamentum 69:3 (2019), 361-387; DOI 10.1163/15685330-12341370. Open access at Brill and read in full here, which is where both of the sentences quoted in the fourth section come from — the abstract's own statement of aim and the last paragraph's request for modesty. The argument is restated at length with Z. Thomas in "Complexity Without Monumentality in Biblical Times," Journal of Archaeological Research 32:1 (2024), 59-101Supports: The nomad argument, and Ben-Yosef's own statement of what it is and is not, in his own publication
ScholarshipN. Sukenik, D. Iluz, Z. Amar, A. Varvak, O. Shamir and E. Ben-Yosef, "Early evidence of royal purple dyed textile from Timna Valley (Israel)" — Naama Sukenik and colleagues · PLOS ONE 16:1 (2021), e0245897, open access. Murex-derived royal purple — argaman, not the blue tekheletSupports: The dyed textiles and their identification
ScholarshipP. Bienkowski, "The Formation of Edom: An Archaeological Critique of the 'Early Edom' Hypothesis" — Piotr Bienkowski, University of Manchester · Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research 388 (2022), 113-132. The systematic published case against the nomadic-polity model · paywalledSupports: The principal opposition to Ben-Yosef's reading
ScholarshipN. Glueck, The Other Side of the Jordan — Nelson Glueck, American Schools of Oriental Research · New Haven, 1940; second edition 1970. The survey volume in which the Arabah copper industry was tied to the united monarchy — the identification that attached "King Solomon's mines" to Timna, and which Glueck never withdrew. Print onlySupports: Glueck's original claim, in his own publication
EncyclopediaWikipedia: Timna Valley

Reflect

For fifty years the field could not see a whole society because it was looking for buildings. What are you failing to notice because it does not come in the shape you expect?