The Wounded Soldier Who Found Joshua's Altar on Mount Ebal
In the autumn of 1973, a young Israeli officer named Adam Zertal lay in a bed at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, his body torn apart by the fighting of the Yom Kippur War. His injuries were devastating. He underwent twelve operations, spent approximately a year in Hadassah Hospital, and left in a wheelchair with a permanent disability. He had grown up on a kibbutz and had already experienced archaeology through excavations at Masada. But during his long recovery, his interest became a calling. At the hospital, he met archaeologist Yoram Tsafrir, who helped inspire him to pursue the buried history of the land. That decision would eventually lead him to one of the most debated discoveries in Israeli archaeology.
That alone would be a story worth telling. What he pulled out of the ground makes it unforgettable.
A man on crutches who walked the whole land
When Zertal finally got back on his feet, he could not march the way he once had. So he did something stubborn and a little bit crazy. He decided to survey an entire region of the biblical heartland on foot, limping across hills and dry riverbeds that most scholars had only ever studied from a map or the window of a car. This was the hill country of Manasseh, the rugged territory of northern Samaria that the book of Joshua hands to the tribe of Menashe. Year after year he and his team walked it, field by field and ruin by ruin, writing down everything they saw.
In 1980, on the northeastern shoulder of Mount Ebal, the mountain that looms over the ancient city of Shechem, his team came upon a strange heap of stones in a natural bowl of rock. Broken pottery scattered around it pointed to a very early period, the centuries around 1200 BCE, exactly the window when the Bible describes Israel entering the land. Zertal went back with shovels. For eight seasons, from 1982 to 1989, he and his students dug.
What came up was no ordinary ruin. At the center sat a large rectangular structure, roughly nine meters by seven, its thick walls still rising, packed solid with layers of stone and ash. There was no doorway into it, which makes no sense at all for a house or a tower. A sloping stone ramp climbed one side to the top. Around it lay the burned bones of young cattle, sheep, goats and fallow deer, every one of them an animal the Torah permits for sacrifice, every one of them charred as though offered up in fire. Among the discoveries were Egyptian scarabs, which, together with pottery from the site, helped archaeologists date its occupation to approximately the 13th–12th centuries BCE, a period associated with the emergence of early Israel in the central highlands.
Zertal opened his Tanakh and felt his skin prickle. In Deuteronomy, Moshe commands the people that once they cross the Jordan they must build an altar of unhewn stones on Mount Ebal and offer sacrifices there. In the book of Joshua, chapter eight, Joshua does exactly that, raising an altar on Ebal and renewing the covenant before all of Israel. Around it lay the burned bones of young cattle, sheep, goats and fallow deer, every one of them an animal the Torah permits for sacrifice, every one of them charred as though offered up in fire. So Zertal said out loud what a lot of people were afraid to say. He believed he had found the altar of Joshua.
Not everyone agreed with him, and it is only honest to say so. Archaeologists have debated Zertal's interpretation for decades. Some recognize the site as an early Israelite place of worship without accepting that it was Joshua's altar. Others have suggested it was a watchtower or farmstead. The debate continues, but one thing remains remarkable: on the very mountain named in the Torah, Zertal uncovered an ancient structure dating to the period when Israelite society was emerging in the hills of Samaria.
I love this story because it quietly refuses to let the lie stand. The bond between the Jewish people and this particular soil was pressed into clay seals and burned into the bones of sacrifices offered by people who kept the same commandments Jews keep to this very day. Adam Zertal spent the rest of his life defending what he had found, and when he died in 2015 the argument was still raging around him. That is exactly how it should be, because real discoveries are worth fighting over. A man was told he might never see clearly again. He ended up seeing further back than almost anyone alive, all the way to the first altar of a people coming home. His mountain still rises over Shechem, and the altar still sits where his students uncovered it. The nation that first built it is living in the land to this hour, kadima, moving forward and rooted in a past that no one will ever be able to dig away.
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