Hershel Shanks

Solomonic gate. 1 Kings 9:15–17 tells us that Solomon built “Hazor and Megiddo and Gezer.” Because almost identical Solomonic gates had been excavated at Hazor and Megiddo, the excavator of Hazor, Yigael Yadin, was able to identify and precisely locate Gezer’s gate even when only part of it had been exposed and this part had been misidentified by an earlier excavator.

In this view we are looking through the four-entry gate from inside the city. A deep drainage channel runs from the gate’s first entry at the rear, to the foreground of the photo. On either side of this channel (which was covered shortly after its construction) are three chambers that open onto the central passage. (See the plan, in which the six chambers are numbered and the four entries are indicated.) Travelers entering the city could water their animals at the rectangular trough in one of the gate’s first chambers, seen here at the far left. Remains of benches were found along the walls of all of these chambers.