The elderly patriarch and matriarch of a prominent Israelite family living in an imposing building in the Judean lowlands nearly 3,000 years ago appear to have enjoyed their own spacious room in a strategic part of the large home, suggesting they continued to play a prominent role within the multi-generation household into their golden years, a new study has proposed.

The research by Bar-Ilan University Prof. Avraham Faust into Room B of Building 101 at Tel ‘Eton appears to shed new light on family dynamics, and particularly how the elderly were regarded, during the heyday of the Israelite kingdom, a subject about which little is known, including from the Bible and contemporary texts.

The structure, erected on the top of the mound at the site some 20 miles (32 kilometers) southeast of Ashkelon, was a typical Israelite “four-room house,” albeit significantly larger than most. The term refers to a building divided into four spaces, sometimes further subdivided into smaller rooms, a very common setup during the Iron Age (1200-586 BCE), when most of the biblical narratives are said to have taken place.

According to radiocarbon analysis, the Tel ‘Eton building was erected in the late 11th or early 10th centuries BCE, but the study on the elderly considered the last years of its existence in the 8th century BCE, before the Assyrians conquered Israel and destroyed the town. T.he blaze that engulfed the home ended up leaving many of the objects inside intact, allowing for their detailed study by Faust some 2,700 years later.

“We are lucky because the state of preservation is excellent,” Faust told The Times of Israel. “We have a vast amount of information about how the building functioned and how the people lived in it on the eve of the destruction, because the destruction sealed the finds and the fire preserved lots of things.”

The study, published in the prestigious Cambridge Archaeological Journal last month, theorizes that Room B was occupied by elderly family matriarch and/or patriarch based on several pieces of circumstantial evidence, including its location on the first floor of what would have been a two-story home.

Faust’s conclusions largely rest on his interpretation of the archaeological findings combined with an understanding of family dynamics based on biblical studies, anthropology and ethnography.

There are several reasons Faust believes several nuclear families lived in the 101 Building.

One is its size: about 225 square meters (2,400 square feet) on the ground floor alone, about the........

© The Times of Israel