Arguments of Ignorance V: Song of Specifics

Song of Solomon 7:4: "Your neck is like an ivory tower. Your eyes are like the pools in Heshbon by the gate of Bath-rabbim,

Numbers 21:26: "For Heshbon was the city of Sihon the king of the Amorites, who had fought against the former king of Moab and taken all his land out of his hand, as far as the Arnon."

Many readers will say the Song of Songs is just love-worn and pining love poetry from Solomon. This might be partially true. It also serves as a theological discourse in biblical sexuality and where it references geographical places...it is correct. It ironically is also mentioned in Numbers which should’ve given pause to the skeptics but alas, did not. So, when they found the archeological evidence, these experts looked that much more foolish.

It was long believed that Heshbon's great pool cut into its hill was just embellishment or imagery to invoke certain feelings. In the Song of Songs, the groom tells his bride, “Your eyes are like the pools in Heshbon.” Skeptics refer to this as pretty poetry and nothing more. But Heshbon was a real city on a hill in Jordan. When diggers worked down through a hilltop in Jordan, they found a huge water reservoir cut into the rock, more than fifty feet across, from the days of Israel's kings. Still, clear water in a dry land. The groom was pointing at something every traveler on that road had seen.

Archaeological excavations have uncovered remains from several historical periods, including Iron Age, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic occupations. Tell Hesban, about 12 miles (20 km) southwest of Amman, Jordan, is identified by most scholars with biblical Heshbon, the city of Sihon (Numbers 21:26) and later a town of Moab. The Heshbon Expedition of Andrews University (1968-1976) and later the Madaba Plains Project found Iron Ageremains on the summit, including a large, plastered reservoir cut into the bedrock, roughly 17 meters square and about 7 meters deep, among the largest water installations of its period in Jordan.The photo shows the summit of Tell Hesban today.

There are then the engineering claims that state that the engineering available in Solomon’s time wouldn’t have been advanced enough to produce the volume and clarity that history describes about the pools.

It had an astounding capacity for the Iron Age. The uncovered bedrock-cut reservoir measures roughly 17.5 by 17.5 meters and is 7 meters deep, capable of holding an estimated 2.2 million liters or approx. 580,000 gallons of water…the size of a modern day Olympic pool. There was an intricate network of channels and subterranean cisterns cut into the bedrock that fed the pool also. The subterranean cisterns were specifically designed to capture rainwater and maximize water storage in an arid climate.