Among the ubiquitous “Best of 2025” lists was an inventory of the top ten discoveries of the year from Biblical Archaeology Review, a main source of research for my novel retelling the stories of the Exodus from the point of view of non-biblical characters. A few of the finds, like a fragment of correspondence between the king of Assyria and the royal court of Hezekiah that may relate to Hezekiah’s revolt described in 2 Kings 18:7, further bolster the case for reliable historical records appearing in the later books of the Hebrew Bible.
This is of course very exciting, but my historical fiction story takes place centuries earlier. So I was much more interested in another major archaeological development from last year: the analysis of finds from a series of rock-cut rooms only a few hundred yards from Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. Archaeologists at the Israel Antiquities Authority believe these rooms may have been hewn directly into Mount Zion at around the time of the Exodus, and that their use was religious (or, in archaeology parlance, “cultic”). I clicked breathlessly on the link: Could there be evidence here about how the tribes and clans who would later call themselves the Children of Israel actually worshiped their god — or gods — in the Bronze Age?
Nope. The IAA researchers are pretty well certain that the rooms, eight in all, were cut out of the rock during the Bronze Age; but all of the sacred objects that were found, carefully preserved in a sealed room when the temple was decommissioned, date to the following era of the Iron Age. So we can’t be sure that these eight rooms were chiseled in Jerusalem stone in devotion to a deity, or whether the space was repurposed many years later. And if the Iron Age temple had always been religious in nature, there is no reason to think that the deity known as Jehovah or Yahweh was venerated there. BAR’s Nathan Steinmeyer writes: “It seems unlikely that it was a place of worship for the Israelite god Yahweh, as it would be unusual to have two temples to the same deity within such proximity.”
Well, I can think of one main reason this was a temple from the jump: It would have taken quite an investment of resources to carve out rooms in the rock a thousand years before Solomon, when most Jerusalemites were already living aboveground in homes built from stone. So it seems to me that this series of rooms must have had a compelling raison d’etre from the very beginning, and one of the most compelling reasons to splurge on time and labor has always been to honor one’s god. In the video that accompanies the BAR article, Eli Shukron from the IAA describes the specific uses of some of the rooms, from an olive press for making ceremonial oil to an altar where animals were slaughtered and their blood drained out. As I explained in last month’s blog post, anointing altars with oil and sacrificing animals are two rituals described (if not really explained) in the Hebrew Bible on several occasions. The presence of an olive oil press and slaughtering platform doesn’t prove that these activities were spiritual in nature on this site, but it sure gives a strong hint.
There is, however, one very convincing bit of evidence that these rooms constituted a temple just a short walk from Solomon’s edifice. In one of the rooms is a kind of holy of holies where a standing stone — called a matzevah (plural matzevot) in Hebrew — was left in place when all of the other ceremonial objects were stored away. Hundreds of these monoliths have been found in the Sinai Desert, many of them predating biblical times by thousands of years. They are also features of Bronze age temples in other Israelite cities like Arad, where Yahweh was in fact worshiped.
So as I further explore the antiquity of rituals ascribed to biblical forefathers like Jacob and Moses, this Jerusalem temple with its bloodletting altar, olive press and matzevah gives me a few plausible scenarios for ceremonies my characters might have engaged in around the time of the Exodus. That certainly makes it my top archaeological find of 2025.
As if to prove a point about the impenetrability of ancient finds, another room in the Jerusalem matzevah temple has mysterious V-shaped markings on the floor that don’t conform to any known Judaic or other Middle Eastern iconography. Their scale is very clear in the video embedded with the BAR piece; they look to be at least two feet long and a number of inches deep. The IAA archaeologists are so clueless about what they might be, they are asking the general public for suggestions — a very unusual circumstance.
The carvings remind me a tiny bit of very ancient stone structures in Saudi Arabia — not far from where, based on the research of Colin J. Humphreys, I place the Mountain of God in the third part of my novel. These stone circles and oblongs, called “mustatils” after the Arabic word for rectangle, are around 7,000 years old, or vastly older than Stonehenge which was constructed 5,000 years ago at the earliest. The mustatils were built on an enormous scale, really only clearly visible from the air, and may also have an underlying relationship with the matzevot: “Excavations [of the mustatils in Saudi Arabia] have revealed hundreds of fragments of animal remains, clustered around an upright slab of stone interpreted as sacred,” wrote Michelle Starr of Science Alert in 2023.
Standing stones, of course, are found not only in the Levant and Arabia but also in northern Europe, so it’s hard to venture any except the flimsiest of connections if you’re a card-carrying archaeologist. But for me as a historical novelist, there’s nothing more liberating than an age-old mystery. Especially since the idea of rituals and their attendant beliefs being passed down from generation to generation for millennia is the very seed of my love for this fiction project, which has sustained me for more than 15 years. And who knows — if cinnamon traveled thousands of miles from India to today’s Israel, perhaps this tradition did, too.
