We visited Lachish (modern day Tell ed-Duweir) a couple weeks ago.
Our guide for the day was the wonderfully erudite Gabi Barkai, who dug at the site with David Ussishkin during the twenty years of renewed excavations which began in the mid-1970's. Of all the Iron Age sites we've toured this year, it was Lachish that I was most anticipating. The tell itself is fascinating, with successive layers of fortifications from the beginnings of the Iron Age through the Persian period laying on top of one another.
Lachish itself sits on the border between the fertile lowlands of the Shephelah and the Judean hill country. Its fortification by Hezekiah and its dramatic siege by Sennacherib in 701 BCE were key moments in the history of monarchic Judah. Several of the building blocks of biblical culture were set in place during this period. Judah began to assert herself as a regional power, to develop an idea of collective national identity, and to consider Jerusalem as the sole sanctuary of her national God. And it was control of Lachish and the fertile lands around it, which made this expansion possible.
More than a hundred years later, it was to Lachish that the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar turned before conquering Jerusalem itself. And it was during that period that the famous Lachish ostraca, possibly the most interesting cache of documents from the pre-exilic period in Israel, were written and deposited in this gatehouse:
While we walked the tell, listening to Barkai's thorough and sensitive descriptions, I was taken back to my visit to the British Museum in January of last year. I had rushed immediately for the Assyrian rooms to see the reliefs excavated by Austen Henry Layard at Nineveh in the mid-19th century. Surrounded by the monumental icons of the Assyrian imperium, I eventually found myself in the room containing the palace reliefs of King Sennacherib himself. Depicting in lurid detail his siege and conquest of Lachish, they corroborate the outlines of the Bible's own historical account of this period. The very ramp the Assyrians laid against the walls of the city and which they inscribed into their pictorial account of the battle still sits today against the side of the tell.
The Assyrians ruled through the cultivation of abject terror and the reliefs themselves are replete with images of the savagery of empire: legions of archers, processions of conquered peoples, corpses impaled on spikes. As I walked with Barkai and the other fellows, I tried to imagine the horrors those ancients, my fascinating subjects of study, had suffered.
But back in January, as I wandered through the rooms, I remember being shocked at the sound of two Israeli tourists behind me speaking to one another in Hebrew.
Like the philosopher said: "The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small."
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