Overview
A city gate with three chambers on each side of the passage, set in a casemate wall around the western part of Hazor's upper city. Yigael Yadin exposed it in the 1957-1958 seasons of the James A. de Rothschild Expedition; the final report for those seasons is Hazor III-IV (1989).
Yadin assigned the gate and casemate wall to Stratum X and, noticing the same plan at Megiddo and (from Macalister's plan) Gezer, tied the three to the list in 1 Kings 9:15 (IEJ 8, 1958). That comparison is the origin of the 'Solomonic gates' label.
Whether Stratum X is 10th-century (Solomon) or 9th-century (Omrides) has been argued in print since 1999 between Finkelstein and the Hazor excavators Ben-Tor and Ben-Ami.
What the evidence shows
- Six-chamber plan (three chambers each side of the passage) joined to a casemate wall (Yadin; summarised by Madain Project from the excavation reports).
- Stratum X: the stratum Yadin gave the gate; Dever (JJAR 1, 2021, n. 33) cites Zarzecki-Peleg 1997 and Ben-Tor & Ben-Ami 1998 for its 10th-c. date.
- No inscription or datable object naming a builder is associated with the gate in any source checked.
Open questions
- Date of Stratum X: Ben-Tor and Ben-Ami ('Hazor and the Archaeology of the Tenth Century B.C.E.', IEJ 48, 1998) and Ben-Tor (BASOR 317, 2000; NEA 76.2, 2013) keep it in the 10th c.; Finkelstein ('Hazor and the North in the Iron Age: A Low Chronology Perspective', BASOR 314, 1999; Tel Aviv 27, 2000) lowers it to the 9th c. The ceramic arguments in these papers have not been reviewed for this entry; only titles, venues and the positions they take were verified.
- Link to Megiddo: Finkelstein et al. (Tel Aviv 46, 2019) date Megiddo's six-chambered Gate 2156 to Strata VA-IVB in the Omride period; if the Hazor and Megiddo gates are one design, the Megiddo date bears directly on Hazor's.
- Sameness of the three gates: Yadin (1958) described the Gezer gate as matching Hazor and Megiddo; Dever (2021) reports this as 'almost identical in plan'. A measured side-by-side comparison has not been located for this entry.
Sources
- Yigael Yadin et al., Hazor III-IV: An Account of the Third and Fourth Seasons of Excavation, 1957-1958 (text volume, ed. A. Ben-Tor and S. Geva; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1989). link excavation report
- Yigael Yadin, "The Fourth Season of Excavations at Hazor," The Biblical Archaeologist 22.1 (1959): 2-20. doi:10.2307/3209103 link excavation report
- Yigael Yadin, "Solomon's City Wall and Gate at Gezer," Israel Exploration Journal 8.2 (1958): 80-86. link study
- Israel Finkelstein, "Hazor and the North in the Iron Age: A Low Chronology Perspective," BASOR 314 (1999): 55-70. doi:10.2307/1357451 link study
- Amnon Ben-Tor, "Hazor and the Chronology of Northern Israel: A Reply to Israel Finkelstein," BASOR 317 (2000): 9-15. doi:10.2307/1357481 link study
- Amnon Ben-Tor, "Hazor in the Tenth Century B.C.E.," Near Eastern Archaeology 76.2 (2013): 105-109. doi:10.5615/neareastarch.76.2.0105 link study
- William G. Dever, "Solomon, Scripture, and Science," Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology 1 (2021): 102-125. doi:10.52486/01.00001.4 link study
Corrected from the earlier edition of this page
- Old entry: excavated 'in the 1950s and 1960s'. The gate was exposed in the 1957-1958 seasons (Hazor III-IV); Yadin returned to Hazor in 1968-1969 (BA 32.3, 1969), not for the gate.
- Old entry: gates 'identical' at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer. The verified sources say 'almost identical in plan' (Dever 2021 reporting Yadin); no side-by-side measurements were located.
- Old entry: 'Dimensions: approximately 10 meters wide' and 'Date: c. 1000 BCE'. Neither figure was found in a verified source; the date is contested between 10th and 9th c. BCE.
- Old entry cites 1 Kgs 10:26 and 1 Kgs 4:19 as connections; neither mentions Hazor. The relevant verse is 1 Kgs 9:15.
- Old summary box claims ('Evidence of Solomonic building program') removed as facts; the Solomonic attribution is a reading dependent on the Stratum X date.
Checked against new publications through 2026-09.