Tell Balata

Tell Balata is the mound, in the pass between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, that is identified as the site of ancient Shechem. It lies east of Nablus, and the village of Balata covers part of it.

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The Excavations

Ernst Sellin, who had moved to the University of Kiel in 1913, led the first excavations that year. Interrupted by the First World War and resumed in 1926, the German work ran to 1934. Sellin's work on the excavation reports and all his materials were lost when his house was destroyed in World War II.

From 1956 to 1964 five American expeditions, begun by the Drew-McCormick Expedition with the American Schools of Oriental Research and directed by G. Ernest Wright, corrected the German work. From 2010 a Dutch-Palestinian project, funded by the Netherlands until 2014, worked on conserving and developing the site.

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The Bronze Age City

The earliest signs of life on the mound are scattered encampments of the Chalcolithic period, found just above bedrock. The site then appears to have stood empty until building began in earnest in the early Middle Bronze Age. In that age a "cyclopean" wall of huge stones was built, with gates on the east and the northwest. On an artificial mound the builders raised a mighty temple-fortress, its walls about 17 feet (5 m) thick.

The excavators held that a second temple was later built on the site, with a great stone slab set facing its altar and entrance, and Wright dated the two temples together to about 1650 to 1100 BC. Bryant G. Wood, writing in Bible and Spade in 2005, holds it possible that the temple's standing stone, "an enormous limestone stela, or massebah," was Joshua's witness stone, the "large stone" Joshua set up under the oak (Joshua 24:26-27).

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The Temple and Judges 9

In the account of Abimelech's conspiracy, Abimelech was paid from the temple of Baal-berith (Judges 9:4) and burned the inner chamber of the temple of El-berith over the leaders of the tower of Shechem (Judges 9:46-49). Eugene D. Stockton, writing in the Australian Journal of Biblical Archaeology in 1968, reported Wright's view that the temple of Baal-berith fits the archaeological evidence. Lawrence E. Stager, then Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel at Harvard, argued in Biblical Archaeology Review in 2003 that neither excavation team had recognized the building as "the temple of El, Lord of the Covenant, featured in Judges 9."

Wood holds instead that the fortress temple itself, built in the 17th century BC, stood until Abimelech destroyed the city in the 12th century BC (Judges 9:45), and he reports that the excavators date that destruction to about 1125 to 1100 BC. P. J. Kearney is more cautious, finding no clear evidence that the temple itself was destroyed in the Early Iron Age.

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Gaps and the Last Town

Wood writes that after this destruction the site was deserted for about a century, until it was built again in the tenth century BC. In Iron Age II the town belonged to the kingdom of Israel, and the Assyrians destroyed it, leaving a layer of burned debris among its houses and storerooms. That destruction is dated to the Assyrian invasion of about 724 BC; Samaria itself fell in 722 BC (2 Kings 17:5-6). For centuries afterward the site was a village at most, very thinly settled and for a time wholly abandoned.

Wright, writing in 1962, held that the town's sudden rebuilding in the last third of the 4th century BC was most simply explained as its reoccupation by the Samaritans, in place of Samaria. The town was then a Samaritan center until it was destroyed by the Jewish high priest John Hyrcanus I. Wright's excavations dated the end of Shechem as a city to 107 BC, and Hyrcanus may have destroyed it in the same campaign as Samaria. Kearney dates Hyrcanus's devastation of the city earlier, to 127 BC, and holds that the town lingered a few years afterward.

Vespasian later built a new city, Flavia Neapolis, west of the mound, and modern Nablus takes its name from it. Beside the mound lies the traditional site of Joseph's tomb.