It was like a scene from a horror film: Archaeologists excavating an ancient biblical site uncovered a two-meter deep cache of human bones. Noting their small size, however, they realized that this must be a mass grave for children. Cue the sinister soundtrack.

Prof. Oded Lipschits of Tel Aviv University and his team had been excavating at the ancient site of Tel Azekah for about two years when, in 2013, they came across the ancient water reservoir.

At the deeper, more ancient levels, the archaeologists found what is to be expected in such structures — pottery vessels used to draw water. But closer to the surface, they were stunned to find hundreds of small human bones.

“We excavated very carefully and very slowly, we collected every piece of bone and every item, we documented every centimeter of the area, but we didn’t really understand what we found,” Lipschits told The Times of Israel over the telephone. “It took me some years to be brave enough to investigate this discovery.”

Located in the Shephelah (or Judean Lowlands), some 30 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem, Tel Azekah presents rich remains that attest to its occupation for thousands of years, dating back to the Early Bronze Age around 3,500 years ago. It is also mentioned in the Bible as the location of the iconic battle between David and the Philistine giant Goliath (Samuel I 17:1).

With plenty of less gruesome finds to investigate, the researchers did not return to examine the bone trove until 2020. After several years, the mass grave has been revealed to the public for the first time in a study published in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly journal at the end of last month.

In the study, the authors documented a minimum of 68 and up to 89 individuals, 90% of whom were under five years old and 70% under two years old. The bodies were deposited there over a period of about 100 years, between the 6th and the 5th centuries BCE, at the beginning of the Persian period, when Tel Azekah was a Judean town.

According to Lipschits, the infant mass grave, the first of this kind uncovered in Israel, sheds unprecedented light on possible burial practices for young children who, given their age and the high mortality rate, might not have been considered eligible for an individual grave.

“[Archaeologists] who have excavated cemeteries from the Iron Age [1200-586 BCE] and the Persian period [586-333 BCE], have usually not found babies,” said Lipschits. “Now, we might have found the solution [to this enigma].”

A century of baby burials

Hila May, an expert in Anatomy and Anthropology at TAU who joined the research and co-authored the paper, said she had never seen an assemblage of so many bodies together.

“We estimated the number of individuals and their age by counting the bones and measuring their size,” she told The Times of Israel over the telephone.

While the bodies are assumed to have been deposited (or possibly thrown) in the cistern intact, the bones were scattered and were not preserved as intact or partially intact skeletons.

According to May, it is normal for bones........

© The Times of Israel