Word: beersheeba
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Beersheeba, Israel, Archaeologist Jean Perrot of the French National Center of Scientific Research was assembling workers last week to excavate some of the strangest dwellings ever built by man. The original find was made in 1952, when Perrot and a team of diggers were investigating a small hill on the sandy desert south of Beersheeba. For three months he had found little; then one day a workman, who had just urged him to call the whole thing off, fell through the sand into a deep cave. Perrot climbed down after him with professional precaution and found what he thinks...
Most students of Bible history believe that the Negeb, Israel's southern desert, was an uninhabited wilderness when Abraham (a middle Bronze Age man) came to Beersheeba about 1500 B.C. One short reference puzzled them. The book of Genesis (14:6) refers to Horites (cave dwellers) who lived "by the wilderness" and were smitten by Chedorlaomer, King of Elam. But until the fall of Perrot's man, no trace of the Horites had been found...
Perrot's work in the land of the Horites is not finished. In the outskirts of Beersheeba, he has found seven buried cave villages, one of which has a two-storied room shaped like an hourglass. When he has explored all of them and learned by radioactive analysis just how old they are, he will be able to tell better than the Bible does what life was like "by the wilderness" before the time of Abraham...
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