Cities and Towns in Ancient Israel (Bronze and Iron Ages)

Abstract

Many cities have been uncovered from Bronze and Iron Age Israel, the vast majority of which were located on tells – artificial mounds created as a result of gradual human settlement activity. Notably, not every location is suitable for the emergence of a center, even of a local nature, and each site had advantages and disadvantages in relation to factors such as security, water supply, transportation (roads), and the availability of soils for agriculture. Consequently, only several locations could, in antiquity, provide livelihood for a large population at any given region. This resulted in a repeating pattern in which the centers of many periods were continuously located one on top of the other, thus creating the famous tells which are so typical of the Middle Eastern landscape. Although in many instances extramural neighborhoods were built on the slopes of the tells (and in some rare instances cities were not built on tells), it is only in the later half of the first millennium BCE that the overall pattern changed. By then most tells were abandoned, and cities were built practically everywhere. The gradual process of tell abandonment resulted from many factors, including changes in security conditions, increased population, and improved technology, but this process lies outside the scope of the present discussion. Notably, the towns (and tells) of ancient Israel were much smaller than their contemporaries in Mesopotamia and Syria. An average city of the Bronze and Iron Age covered some 3–5 ha (and sometimes even less); larger towns, in the scale of 7–12 ha, were also present. Towns of 20 ha, however, were exceptionally large, and megalopolises of 60 ha and more were extremely rare – very few such sites existed in the periods discussed here (e.g., Hazor in the Middle Bronze Age II and Late Bronze Age and Jerusalem in the Iron Age II). Defining a city is a complex enterprise. Within the scope of the present entry, suffice it to note that the urban centers were much larger and more crowded than their rural contemporaries. Their inhabitants were of diverse backgrounds and occupations, and not all of them were engaged in agriculture. Social stratification is evident in practically all such sites, along with public buildings and royal construction activities (palaces, walls, storehouses, water systems, etc.). These urban settlements served as political and economic centers for the villages that surrounded them and, probably also, during most periods, as centers of tax collection and as places of refuge in times of need.