Khirbet Nisya

Overview

Khirbet Nisya is an archaeological site in the central hill country north of Jerusalem, on the eastern slope of the ridge of Jebel et-Tawil beside the modern settlement of Psagot, about three kilometres south west of et-Tell. It is the site that David Livingston excavated for the Associates for Biblical Research over more than twenty years, on the argument that it is the Ai of the book of Joshua.

Excavation History

Livingston directed the excavation from 1979 to 2002. The finds span the Middle Bronze Age to the early Roman period and include a scarab and a ribbed dagger of the Middle Bronze Age, an Iron Age burial cave holding the remains of about fifty people, rock cut installations for pressing oil, ritual baths, pottery kilns of the Persian and Hellenistic periods, and Hasmonean and Herodian coins. Bryant G. Wood worked here as a field archaeologist in several seasons between 1985 and 1994, before he took over the excavation at Khirbet el-Maqatir.

The Identification with Ai

The case for Khirbet Nisya rests on Livingston's prior argument that biblical Bethel is el-Bireh rather than Beitin, since the biblical account places Ai east of Bethel and so fixes one by the other. The identification did not win acceptance. The site produced no destruction layer of the kind the account of the capture would suggest, and the two other candidates remain the ones most discussed: et-Tell, the traditional identification, and Khirbet el-Maqatir, which the Associates for Biblical Research itself now excavates and proposes as Ai. Livingston's own organisation therefore ended up arguing for a different site from the one he dug.