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King Solomon’s mines? Rabbi Nelson Glueck tended to attribute his finds to Biblical kings: He believed—incorrectly, as he later conceded—he had found King Solomon’s copper mines in the Timna Valley and his smelting plant at Tell el-Kheleifeh in the Negev. Like his teacher William F. Albright, Glueck sometimes allowed Bible-based preconceptions to mar his interpretations, ascribing, for example, a steep reduction in third-millennium B.C.E. settlements in Transjordan to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.