Suba Surprises…
As readers of The Jesus Dynasty know Shimon Gibson and I have been excavating the cave outside of Ein Kerem at ancient Suba since March, 2000. We have loosely referred to it as the “John the Baptist Cave” both because of its location in an area where John grew up and is revered even today, but even more so due to the early Byzantine art work on the walls depicting scenes from John’s life. Shimon Gibson’s popular book, The Cave of John the Baptist (Random House, 2004) surveys the basic evidence. I highly recommend this book not only for its information about our excavation up through 2004, but for the wealth of information it contains on John the Baptist. I have also included in my book, The Jesus Dynasty, photos, drawings, and a summary interpretation of the Suba cave, as it might relate to the time of Jesus and John the Baptist.
The past two years we have begun to concentrate more on the origins of the installation, which we can now date to the Iron Age (time of Isaiah and even earlier). We had previously discovered a series of filtering pools outside the main entrance. We also discovered a corridor running along the top of the Cave, lined with seven standing Pillars which most scholars who have examined it think have some kind of ritual function. Our current working hypothesis is that the installation originally had some kind of “industrial” function, possibly involving the production of clay for ceremic vessels. Here is an arial shot of the site showing things as they looked in March of this year. You can clearly see the excavated corridor running north into the face of the ridge, the pools outside, and the main entrance:
When we finished our work in March we were hoping to totally wrap things up and complete our offical excavation report which we are preparing for publication with the Israel Exploration Society for 2007. We felt we had done about all that could and should be done at the site at this time. As is often the case in archaeology, what one most expects is often upset by a sudden new turn of events. As Gibson and his team were cleaning up things at the north end of the corridor, right where an Iron Age jug had been found in situ at the end of our Spring season, they discovered a new opening–what appeared to be a new cave! It runs above our main chamber, cut into bedrock. We quickly realized we had more work ahead of us. We simply could not leave things as they were. Here is how things appeared on the day of the discovery. You can barely see the top of the opening right at the feet of these diggers:
Over the past two months Gibson and local volunteers have been diligently clearing out this new cave. It is an amazing site, running up into the bedrock and with two small corridor like alcoves running left and right at the end of the passage. On my trip to Israel this past week I was able to see the results of their labor. The entire chamber has now been cleared. We will soon have a firm date from sediment tests but right now we are thinking the stucture as a whole could possible date back to the early Iron Age–a hundred years or even more before Isaiah’s time. The cultic aspects of the site have taken on a new fascination for us. Here is a shot taken just three days ago looking out from the chamber, completely cleared down to the bedrock:
The main chamber is just below this floor, so we have basically two levels–the main cave with entrance, steps, alcove, and a water reservoir gong back 70 feet cut out of solid bedrock, and then this corridor and new chamber up above it. Our speculation at this point is that the new upper corridor was designed to be an aquifying “spring” drawing water from the bedrock and feeding it down into the chamber below. We are going to have the deposits on the sides of the chamber dated but just judging from the design Dr. Gibson is thinking this whole facility was constructed much earlier than we had once thought, perhaps a hundred years or more before the time of Isaiah. What we know from our archaeological evidence is that the facility went out of use fairly early on, within a couple of hundred years, perhaps because of any earthquake. The outside pools began to fill up and the channels were purposely blocked. This left the lower chamber inside, with the steps, as a huge water reservoir. The ceramic evidence inside, along with the floors and stata buildup suggest that sometime in the early Roman period the cave inside began to be used for ritual purposes, as we have described previously, and as Gibson and I cover in our books. Stay turned for more, but this is a preliminary report on what is new and breaking at the Suba cave. Right now we are cautiously assuming we can consider our excavation “finished,” but then again, one never knows. We are in the process of preparing our excavation report volume for publication and sifting through all the evidence. We have yet to issue our “final report” in terms of an overall interpretation of this fascinating site–in use for over 1000 years.