RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Gethsemane Gezer
who discovered there three bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Hebrew, one has the phrase " Boundary of Gezer."
The results of the recent excavations are in a
measure checked and confirmed by excavations
at Tel-Hesy, Taanak, and Megiddo,
2. Excava- though the value of the Gezer excations; The vations is in some respects far greater Troglodytic than at either of the other places
Period, named because of the continuous history uncovered and the greater antiquity to which that history is traced. No less than eight stages in the story of the population of Palestine are revealed in these researches, as represented by eight series of dwellings. The lowest of these stages is referred to troglodytes of a period about 3000 B.C. or earlier, the latest to a period about 100 B.C. The two lowest strata involve the existence of two series of cave-dwellers, of low stature, averaging little above five feet two inches in height; they inhabited a chain of underground chambers somewhat extensive in plan, used flint and bone weapons of the neolithic type, domesticated the cow, pig, sheep, and goat, sacrificed the pig to an underground deity, and cremated their dead; the later of them employed extensively the yoni as a religious emblem. The city of this period was defended by walls of earth faced with stone.
The next two periods, covering perhaps 2500- 1200 B.C., are early Semitic; the people ranged in height from five feet seven inches to five feet eleven inches, flint is gradually replaced by bronze while iron begins to appear toward the end, and the female phallic emblems of the previous period are replaced by those of the male type.
3. Semitic One of the distinguishing features of Period to this period is a " high place " on which the Exile, a megalithic temple is indicated in a
series of rough stone pillars, ten in number, of which eight remain, while the places of the other two are marked, these ten being separated by an interval into groups of three and seven. Of the eight still standing seven are of native stone, while the other has been brought from a distance, and is still marked by a groove which perhaps held the ropes by which it was dragged. These pillars range in height from five feet five inches to ten feet six, and one of them shows clear traces of having been an object of worship. The city wall of these periods and the next was of stone, fourteen feet in thickness and nearly a mile in circumference. These two strata, as well as the one immediately preceding, yielded many scarabs, most of them belonging to the middle kingdom of Egypt, and in particular abundance rude pottery images of a cow — the emblem of fertility and connected with Astarte. This period also yielded several examples of the foundation sacrifice, including infants, a young girl, and an aged and deformed woman and an old man. Some such cult as Moloch-worship is implied by the many charred remains of skeletons of infants. One object belonging to the end of this period is a masonry box-tomb with objects of art in silver and alabaster and a mirror, an exotic suggesting perhaps the Philistine occupation. The fifth and sixth strata cover the Hebraic period, the fifth being IV.— S3
apparently that of the city destroyed by the Pharaoh of I Kings ix. 16, and the next the Gezer of the Hebrew regal period. In this age foundation sacrifice was merely symbolical, indicated by deposition of bowls without the skeleton. The end of this age, corresponding to the Assyrian occupation, is represented by two tablets in the cuneiform, neither of them entire, but both dated, one either 649 or 651 B.C., the other two years later. The first relates to the sale of an estate of which a slave and his family formed part, and the governor is Hur-wasi, an Egyptian name, regarded as showing, when taken in conjunction with other Egyptian remains, Egyptian control of the city continuously from Solomonic times. The second records the sale of a field by a Hebrew named Nethaniah. The record of dealings in the Assyrian script under an Egyptian governor repeats the characteristic of the Amarna Tablets.
The seventh period is the Syro-Greek, including the Maccabean age. Characteristic of this is a votive altar, bearing on one side a 4. Syro- dedication to Heracles, on the other Greek the name Yahweh in its Greek form. Period. This reflects the religious eclecticism of the pre-Maccabean age in which Jason the high priest led in promoting the circulation of Greek ideas. A result of the excavations here is the uncovering of the bastions added to the wall by the Syrian occupants and of the palace or castle of Simon, identified by a graffito of limestone with inscription in rude Greek, reading probably, " (Says) Pampras, may fire follow Simon's palace ! " This is interpreted as a magic charm made by a hater of that ruler. The eighth stratum is that of the late Syrian, pre-Roman occupation, after the palace of Simon had been destroyed and on its site a structure reared in which a remarkable series of baths with basins and drain and furnace existed.
The special results of the excavation are the following: (1) The tracing of successive populations backward to the earliest troglodytic 5. Results inhabitants; (2) the existence of conof Excava- tinuous traces of Egyptian occupation tion. from the second troglodytic population (a scarab of Usertesen III., c. 2500 B.C.) to about the middle of the seventh pre- Christian century, including an inscribed statuette of the period of the twelfth dynasty, four and oneeighth inches in height; (3) the existence of a high place where the worship of Astarte is abundantly indicated, especially by a bronze statuette of twohorned Astarte and by numerous phallic emblems; (4) the votive altar already described; (5) the possibility that an inscribed sherd carries back Phenician writing four centuries earlier than the Baal-Hermon inscriptions (c. 600 B.C.) to an age when it was written boustrophedon like the early Greek and the Hittite inscriptions; (6) the illustration of many Biblical features, such as the " tongue " of gold (R.V., " wedge," Josh. vn. 21), two ingots of gold in this form being discovered, one of them being fifty-two shekels in weight. Of gold and silver objects comparatively few were found, but bronze was relatively abundant: fne pottery, while fragmentary, is valuable for its
Grfroerer Gibbon