Zenan was such a small place it scarcely rates a mention in the Bible. It’s included in a list of sixteen towns and villages in the southwestern foothills of the tribal region of Judah reported in Joshua 15:37-41. It may also have been mentioned in Micah 1:11 (spelled Zaanan).
Madison resident Jeff Blakely may know the location of Zenan. He believes he started excavating there last summer, at a site today called Khirbet Sumeilly. Khirbet Sumeilly is just four miles from where he launched his career in archaeology four decades ago.
Tell el-Hesi
Blakely first learned archaeology as a volunteer at the excavations at Tell el-Hesi in southwestern Israel in the summer of 1971 between his freshman and sophomore years of college. Thirty-five years ago he made is first speaking appearance before the Madison Biblical Archaeology Society (MBAS) to talk about Tell el-Hesi.
After earning a PhD. at the University of Pennsylvania, and working at a number of excavations, he returned to Hesi and inherited the job of completing the scientific publication of the site. He’s been able to provide a series of updates on this one particular site to MBAS over a 35-year period, including last Wednesday evening.
While digging in the dirt under the hot summer sun may not sound like the easiest part of an excavation, publishing the results of the excavation in a thorough manner so that other scholars can benefit from the work takes much longer, sometimes decades longer. The tools available to help archaeologists steadily improve, but that also increases the options for complexity.
Tell el-Hesi Neighborhood
To improve the understanding of the context of Tell el-Hesi, Blakely and some colleagues surveyed a 40 square mile block surrounding the site in recent years. They discovered, among other things, that up until the last century the main road between Hebron and Gaza ran right past Hesi. The excavators working on the site 40 years ago did not know about the road, and had no idea why such an apparently important site was located in what is now the middle of nowhere.
The surveyers located 750 archaeological sites of various dates and sizes in the area around Hesi. One site, Khirbet Sumeilly, was particularly intriguing because it apparently existed for only a couple hundred years in the early Iron Age, beginning around the 11th century BC (the time of the biblical King Saul). One other reason for digging, Khirbet Sumeilly seemed to located on the border between Israelite and Philistine territory.
Blakely and his colleagues believe a village like Khirbet Sumeilly could reveal a lot of information about how people lived in the time of Saul, David, and Solomon. Perhaps a small village could be much more revealing than what they had learned at Tell el-Hesi, which was apparently more of a fort at that time, populated by soldiers. So they decided to excavate. But would it be possible to discover the biblical name of this site?
Naming Names
The archaeologists were drawn to the district lists in Joshua, chaper 15. Lachish, a well-known historical and archaeological site, is nearby, and is mentioned in the middle of one district. Another known site, Makkedah is listed last behind Lachish, and is some distance further east.
“We’re hypothesing that the person who recorded this district started at the very west of the district, which we think is Khirbet Sumeilly, and then started going down the road towards the east, recording every town or village as they went by,” Blakely explained in an interview for this week’s Book and the Spade radio program. “If you follow that logic then Khirbet Sumeilly is probably Zenan. Tell el-Hesi, by this same logic, would be Migdal Gad.”
The biblical name of Khirbet Sumeilly may never confirmed unless an inscription is found, which is statistically unlikely. But a bit of biblical detective work provides at least a possible identification.
Program Note: The Madison Biblical Archaeology Society meets next on Sunday, March 25, 2012.