Arad in the Negev

Arad is first mentioned in Scripture in Numbers 21:1, “The king of Arad, the Canaanite, who dwelt in the South, heard that Israel was coming on the road to Atharim, then he fought against Israel and took some of them prisoners.” This was in the last year of the 40 years wilderness wandering.  Israel prayed for deliverance and the LORD gave them victory.

Map by Bibleatlas.org

BAR notes:

The Israelite fortress at Arad is unique in the Land of Israel. It’s the only site excavated with modern archaeological methods that contains a continuous archaeological record from the period of the Judges (c. 1200 B.C.) to the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple (580 B.C.). This distinction promises to make Arad the type-site for pottery chronology, especially in southern Israel, against which pottery from other sites can be confidently tested and dated. Not only is the pottery sequence continuous, but the timelines between the various strata during which the Israelite fortress was built and rebuilt are for the most part clear and can often be connected with well-known historical and datable events.

Arad is also special for other reasons. The Israelite fortress there was found to contain the only Israelite temple ever discovered in an archaeological excavation.

The excavation of the fortress also yielded a unique series of inscriptions. The inscriptions, written for the most part with ink on potsherds—called ostraca (singular, ostracon)—include political, administrative and sometimes even religious documents. Other sites have yielded ostraca collections—for example, the Lachish letters and the Samaria ostraca—but each of those collections belonged to only one major stratum and time period. At Arad the inscriptions span a period of 350 years and cover six different strata. In all, more than one hundred texts and fragments were recovered. (13:02 March/April 1987).

The 2nd paragraph in our quote above mentioned the Israelite temple which has been excavated at Arad. The ruins can be seen in our photo:

Israelite Temple at Arad. Photo by Leon Mauldin.

The raised square platform at right was the altar. This temple was destroyed either in the reforms of Judah’s good king Hezekiah or perhaps Josiah.

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