(Sergio)
that, for the past few years, had been dug by archaeologists
of the Ariel University.
At first glance,
this place seems to be just a simple, ancient town.
But when they started digging,
they found something much more than just that.
They found giant fortification walls,
massive gates, and a layer of destruction that dates back
a whole millennia before Christ.
Wait. Are all those jars? Are those the vessels?
(Prof. Itzhaq Shai)
so it's almost 3,000 years ago.
(Sergio)
Why did they construct these giant walls?
Why did they need fortification on top of this hill?
And more importantly, why was it destroyed?
To answer these questions,
Rhoda and I are en route to the site to meet with the archaeological team.
♪ (music) ♪
- (Nicole on speaker phone)
(Nicole)
Yeah. Hi, Nicole. Good. How are you?
(Nicole)
Yes. We just arrived and we thought,
maybe we could make it up with our own car.
It's a bit high, but I'm not sure.
There's a gate and it's locked.
(Nicole)
There's a little lasso that's on there.
- Okay. - (Nicole)
You just open it up, and then just make sure you close it afterwards
so that the cows stay.
(Sergio)
Is it terrible or...
(Nicole)
(Sergio)
(Nicole)
We're excited. We'll see you up there.
(Nicole)
- Bye-bye. - (Nicole)
All right. So, there's the gate that she said that I need to open.
Oh wow, it's hot.
All right. All right.
Let's give this a try.
It's gonna be quite rough over here in the beginning.
(Rhoda)
(Sergio)
Perfect.
Okay. We made this part.
All right. There we go.
(Rhoda)
Yeah. So she said, you either want to hike it
or make it on the 4 x 4 car.
So, I'm not sure we'll be able to make it in our car.
(Rhoda)
and we don't have a 4 x 4 car.
♪ (music) ♪
(Sergio)
Okay. It's not that bad at all actually, so far.
(Rhoda)
I think the higher you get, the rougher it's gonna get.
I'll tell you what, though. I really am enjoying this.
(Rhoda)
- Oh! - (Rhoda)
Phew. Golly!
There we go.
- We're almost here. - (Rhoda)
Whoo-hoo! There we go.
- (Rhoda)
- (Sergio)
(Nicole)
Worst case, you'll move the car if someone needs it.
- All right. Sounds good. - (Rhoda)
♪ (music) ♪
- That was quite the ride. - (Sergio)
All right. Let's go meet the chief archaeologist.
Wow.
-
Thank you so much for having us here.
Welcome, and thank you for coming.
We're excited.
Would you like to see a little bit about the biblical Libnah?
- Yes. Yes, please. - Okay. So let's go.
(Sergio)
Tel Burna is an archaeological site
believed to be the biblical Libnah,
the very Libnah that is mentioned 17 times in the Hebrew Bible,
beginning with its capture by Joshua
when the Israelites entered the promised land.
This city would have been located in the territory of Judah,
and it is only 15 miles from Jerusalem.
And, according to the Bible, it was a designated city of the Levites.
Now, an interesting character comes from this place.
A woman. Her name is Hamutal.
And the Bible says she is the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah.
But more than that, she is the wife of King Josiah.
(Prof. Shai)
the daughter of Jeremiah from Libnah.
- Whoa. - Now, since, probably,
he didn't meet her in the bar
or somewhere in the cinema...
it's a political marriage.
And the reason that he took someone from here
is because he wanted this site
to be loyal to the capital
and to the royal family.
(Sergio)
and a very famous king, King Josiah.
This is the same king who took the throne
when he was only eight years of age.
This is the king who wholeheartedly followed the Lord.
He took down the high places.
He stirred the people's hearts to follow God.
In fact, he did so much that when he died,
it says that Jeremiah lamented for him
and the people sang lamentations for this special king.
Wow. What a history. That is incredible.
And you are excavating this right now?
(Prof. Shai)
because in a few minutes you won't be able.
You can see here smashed, complete vessels in situ.
(Sergio)
So, it happens to be that Rhoda and I arrived here
on the very last day of their dig for the season,
which is actually a good thing for us
because, by now, they've dug to a very deep level,
and we get to see a layer of destruction
of very high magnitude.
And, this is this, for example...
Aaron, show them. Show them.
This is the roof that smashed this vessel.
So it fell down and smashed the complete storage jar
that you can see there.
(Sergio)
Pottery vessels smashed, still in situ,
dating back to 3,000 years ago.
Wait. Are all those jars, Are those the vessels?
(Prof. Shai)
so it's almost 3,000 years ago.
Here, come.
You can see complete, smashed vessels.
(Sergio)
- (Prof. Shai)
That's unbelievable.
But it's not only that the pottery vessels are smashed here.
They're also finding a thick layer of ash
and even burnt botanical remains.
- Did you see what they just found? - (Rhoda)
(Sergio)
- (Prof. Shai)
-
And they're dating to--
(Prof. Shai)
So, let's say, this is more or less, if we take the Bible,
this is more or less the time of Rehoboam, King of Judah.
So the question remains:
Who could have caused this level of destruction,
and why?
The destruction, as I said, it's late 10th century BCE,
which may, I'm not sure, relate to Shishak,
Shishak, King of Egypt, also mentioned in the Bible.
(Sergio)
is not exactly written in stone, the timing of the destruction
seems to match the event described in the Bible:
when Shishak, King of Egypt, came to destroy Jerusalem,
which is just a few miles away.
And this is not the only layer of destruction they're finding.
They've also previously found a layer of destruction
dating to the 8th century,
to the time of King Hezekiah.
According to the Bible,
the King of Assyria comes to this land, and he tries to capture Jerusalem.
And on his way, he has this campaign of capturing every other city in Judah.
And then it says he went to fight against Libnah.
And this is the same story that God mentions
that Hezekiah cries out to the Lord
and then the Lord destroys 185,000 Assyrian soldiers
in a single night.
It's kind of mind-boggling to think:
all of these events happened in this vicinity.
(Prof. Shai)
And, just here...
you have the gate.
(Sergio)
I mean, if you look at this place from above,
you can see how far the walls actually stretch.
(Prof. Shai)
And I believe that the outer gate should be a little bit more to the south.
(Sergio)
Why was this place so important that both Egyptians
and the Assyrians attacked it?
To answer some of these questions,
the archaeological team is using the latest available technology
to scan the site.
One of such is photogrammetry.
Photogrammetry is a process of taking still images of an object
from multiple angles
and then loading those images onto a computer
that uses machine learning algorithm to process the images
and convert them into a 3D model.
So, we had a chance to meet with Benjamin Yang,
the winner of a 2015 Biblical Archaeology Society scholarship
and a long-time staff member at the site.
Benjamin operates expensive equipment to perform the scanning.
- Photogrammetry. - (Sergio)
- Yes. - (Sergio)
It's, actually, just take a lot of photos
and use software to combine all the photos together
and produce the 3D image.
(Sergio)
and then you put them in a computer and convert them into 3D models
of this entire site.
- The whole site, yes. - (Sergio)
Yeah. If you want, I can send you the image.
(Sergio)
because then our viewers would be able to tell
what it looks like in 3D.
Exactly.
(Sergio)
A casemate fortification that has inner walls
which appear to be significantly larger than any other site.
This is a casemate wall.
A casemate wall is based on two parallel walls.
This is the outer wall, and this is the inner wall,
and, in between, small walls that connect them.
And you get all kinds of small rooms,
- like this one. - Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
(Prof. Shai)
-
It's typical to the Iron Age.
And if you visited, for example, a Khirbet Qeiyafa...
Yeah.
you can see this type of fortification wall.
What is interesting and unique to this place is two issues.
One, it stands for more than 3 meters.
Second, the walls that connect the two walls,
as you can see, it's very massive.
(Sergio)
Could it be that they had built this fortification
because they had been attacked before?
Or perhaps there is a more important reason.
Usually, it's much smaller. But here...
and I don't know how to explain it, at least not yet,
it is very, very massive.
Wow. It does look huge.
But the answers to all of these puzzling questions
might actually lie in the location of this place.
-
(Prof. Shai)
- You can see there's a hill just next to-- - Yeah.
(Prof. Shai)
- (Sergio)
You are going to Goded.
- You see the two peaks? - Yeah.
- This is Goded. Yeah. - That's it?
(Prof. Shai)
- Yeah. - This is Lachish.
Wow.
It looks like this place is positioned in a very strategic location.
I mean, on a clear day, you could probably see the shore,
the Mediterranean Sea, Ashdod, Gaza.
And on the other side, you've got Hebron.
So, from on top of this hill you've got 360-degree views
of all the surrounding Judean Hills.
The location is just in between Philistine Gath
and the main Judah Center in the Shephelah, Lachish.
And this is the story of this place.
(Sergio)
seems to be the obvious answer to these massive walls...
but perhaps there lies a greater reason.
Okay. I have a million dollar question.
So, at the site down there, where you have the destruction layer
that dates to the older period...
did you say it goes as far back as the 10th century BCE?
Yes.
Any chance that King David ever visited this place?
First, what we have there, it's late 10th century BCE.
So, as I said, it's not even Solomon.
If we take the biblical narrative,
it's, let's say, Rehoboam or something like this.
Okay, it's Rehoboam.
What was earlier than that, then?
- We don't know yet. - Okay.
We don't know. We didn't reach.
But, as I said before, we have a late Bronze Age temple,
so this is 14th century BCE.
Whoa.
And here... I don't know.
We will dig and we will see.
(Sergio)
the fortifications and all of the destructions still lie buried
deeper in the ground?
Maybe.
But since this is the last day of the dig,
we'll have to wait until next season when the team comes back
and perhaps discovers even greater ancient secrets.
Okay. Wow. This is exciting.
So that means that we need to come back next season
and see what you guys find.
- Yeah, we will be here. - Oh, awesome.
Wow. Well, thank you so much.
- Thank you. - Thank you for coming.
Thank you.
The ancient secrets buried beneath these grounds
tell a story from Joshua's conquests
to King Hezekiah's reform.
This city has seen many wars.
And as we depart, we keep thinking how, at first,
this place just seemed like an ordinary, ancient site.
But, as the team digs deeper, mysteries are being unveiled.
And, yet, questions still remain.
What else lies underneath these ruins?
Hey, guys. So, we really hope you enjoy this Libnah episode: Tel Burna.
We were fascinated just to be here and hear everything that's been found,
the process,
and we can't wait to come back here, hopefully next year,
and see what else they find if they go down even deeper,
maybe to the time of Solomon.
- Yeah. King David. Yeah. - Maybe to the time of King David.
- And this was such a surprise, wasn't it? - Yeah.
We had just come here to meet the archaeologist,
to ask him about other locations because it's his expertise.
And, yet, this place fell into our laps, and we were, like, okay, we're here.
- We gotta film this. We gotta show this. - Yeah.
Because you read about Libnah in the Bible.
You read it already from the days of Joshua and the division of the land,
and it's just amazing to see it's here.
Yeah.
So, we really hope you enjoy this, guys, and we hope to see you next time.
- Until then, God bless you. - And the best is yet to come.
Amen.
By the way, guys, this is Nicole, and she made it all happen.
- Thank you so much for inviting us here. - Thank you guys for coming!
- It's exciting. - It's exciting.
We love you at Ariel University when you come visit us.
- Thank you so much. - Oh... okay.
Yay!
We've been up since 4:00 in the morning, okay?