Tel Be'er Sheva National Park

The mound rises to 307 metres above sea level and only about 20 metres above the plain around it, which in the Beersheba valley is enough to be the only hill in sight. It sits where the Hebron streambed meets the Beersheba streambed, on what the parks authority describes as the southern edge of the settled world: north of it, loess fields that take about 200 millimetres of rain a year; south and east, desert.

The first traces are Chalcolithic sherds from the fourth millennium BCE with no architecture attached. Then nothing for more than two thousand years. Settlement resumed at the end of the second millennium and ran for roughly five centuries, and the excavators separated it into nine strata. Stratum 9 was pits and huts; Stratum 7, in the tenth century BCE, was about twenty four-room houses set in an oval belt round an open yard, holding perhaps a hundred people. The first fortified town, Stratum 5, went up at the start of the ninth century behind a solid wall four metres thick, with a sloped glacis against its foot and a gate protected by a second, outer gate.

The eighth century brought a rebuild that changed everything. The solid wall came down and a casemate wall, two parallel walls partitioned into rooms, went up in its place. A new gate was built over the ruins of the old one, the outer gate was abandoned, and the water system was repaired after part of its roof fell in. The parks authority reads that scale of change as the aftermath of an earthquake, and notes that some scholars connect it to the one dated in the Book of Amos to two years before the prophet's activity.

The last biblical town, Stratum 2, burned. The destruction is placed at the end of the eighth century BCE and is generally attributed to Sennacherib's campaign of 701 BCE, the one recorded on the Assyrian king's own prism and in 2 Kings. An attempt to rebuild, Stratum 1, was given up almost at once, and the hill stayed in ruins until the Persian period.

• Chalcolithic, fourth millennium BCE: sherds, no buildings
• Strata 9 to 8, twelfth to eleventh centuries BCE: pits, huts, first stone houses
• Stratum 7, tenth century BCE: an enclosed settlement of about 20 houses
• Strata 5 to 4, ninth century BCE: an administrative town behind a solid wall
• Strata 3 to 2, eighth century BCE: rebuilt behind a casemate wall, burned about 701 BCE
• Stratum 1, early seventh century BCE: an abandoned attempt to start again

The thing to look at from the observation tower is not any single building but the shape. The town is an oval, following the contour of the hill, with one deliberate bulge eastward to bring the entrance shaft of the water system inside the defences. A street runs right round the inside of the wall, about two metres wide, and further streets cut across the middle in straight lines. Every street ends at the same place, a square just inside the main gate, which was the only open ground in the town.

That plan did not drift into existence. In the middle of the peripheral street the excavators dug down about three metres and found the line of the earlier street in the same position, which means the layout survived from Stratum 5 in the ninth century through to the end of Stratum 2 in the eighth. Houses were built into the casemate wall, so that a family's back room was a compartment of the defences. The parks authority draws the obvious inference: the people living there were responsible for holding the wall.

The public buildings sit where a planner would put them. Just inside the gate is a complex of about 600 square metres, three storerooms each split by two rows of stone pillars into three long halls, with hundreds of pottery vessels found in the debris. The middle hall of each was a passage for pack donkeys; the side halls held the goods. Nearby is a large building with an entrance corridor, two paved ceremonial halls, living quarters, a kitchen and a store, which the excavators identified with the biblical official of the town and which the park signs call the governor's palace.

The gate itself is now two gates at once, and it takes a moment to read. On the left of the passage is the left-hand side of the eighth-century gate of Strata 3 and 2; on the right, and lower, is the right-hand side of the ninth-century gate of Strata 5 and 4. Plastered benches were found in one of the gate chambers, the sort of seat the Hebrew Bible puts elders, merchants and judges on when business is done in the gate.

Somewhere in the eighth century BCE the people running this town dismantled its sanctuary, broke up the large stone altar that stood in it and used the dressed blocks as ordinary building material in the northern corner of the storehouse. The excavators found them there, recognised them as a set and put them back together as an altar with a horn at each of the four corners, the kind the Hebrew Bible repeatedly names. Yohanan Aharoni published the find in 1974 under the title The Horned Altar of Beer-sheba.

The interesting question is when, because the answer decides which king ordered it. Aharoni's reading, which the parks authority prints today, is that the burial belongs to the religious reform ascribed to Hezekiah of Judah at the end of the eighth century, the same programme credited with putting the temple at Tel Arad out of use. Yigael Yadin disagreed in print two years later, in a Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research article titled Beer-sheba: The High Place Destroyed by King Josiah, dating the wall that held the stones considerably later and giving the credit to a different reforming king. The argument has never been fully settled in favour of one side.

There is a second oddity nearby. The Basement House, whose foundations sit about four metres down with two rooms that seem to have been cellars, struck Aharoni as too deep to be ordinary, and he suggested the depth was created by pulling down the sanctuary that had stood on the spot. That is an interpretation, not a finding, and the park's own literature presents it as his view rather than as fact.

The altar standing in the square at the entrance is a replica. The original, reassembled, is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, so a visitor who wants to see the actual stones needs a separate trip.

A town on this hill had two separate water problems and solved them separately. Ordinary daily supply came from a well sunk just outside the gate, and it is remarkable chiefly for how far down it went. When Tsvika Tsuk re-excavated it in the first stage of Ze'ev Herzog's renewed 1993 to 1995 season, water was reached 69 metres below the surface, which is more than three times the height of the mound above the plain. The parks authority calls it one of the deepest wells in Israel. It may have been cut as early as the first Iron Age settlement on the hill.

Siege supply was a different structure altogether, built into the fortifications on the north-east side. A stone-lined shaft with a stairway set into its wall drops to a reservoir hewn out of chalk, divided into five chambers and holding roughly 700 cubic metres, fed by a winding channel that took flood water off the Hebron streambed. The two accounts the parks authority publishes do not agree on the shaft: the 2026 park brochure, whose text is by Herzog, gives 17 metres, while the authority's own website says 20. Both figures come from the operator, and it is worth knowing that before someone quotes one of them at you.

The reservoir walls are straight, and they are not decorative. They were put in as supports for the ceiling once the chambers had been quarried out, and the thick waterproofing plaster still carries the fingerprints of the people who applied it. The system went out of use at the end of the Hellenistic period, apparently when an earthquake collapsed part of it and blocked the feeder channel. It was cleared, conserved with the Israel Antiquities Authority and opened to visitors in 2003.

One practical consequence of all this: the route out of the water system is a secondary opening cut in antiquity, sealed once the work was finished and reopened by the excavators. It now serves as the exit from the mound, so on the park's own route the descent through the water system ends the visit.

Almost everything standing above knee height at Tel Be'er Sheva has been rebuilt, and the site is unusually straightforward about saying so. A line is marked on the structures. Below it, the walls are original and were found intact in the excavation. Above it, the stonework has been reassembled from blocks recovered in the rubble, or the wall has been raised again in mud brick, the material the Iron Age builders used on their field-stone foundations.

The restoration was carried out in 1990 by what was then the National Parks Authority, with the Negev Tourism Development Administration, under site director Eliyahu Even Haim. The scheme, including the observation tower, was designed by the architect Lawrence A. Belkin with Ze'ev Herzog as archaeological consultant. Conservation of the exposed mud-brick walls had begun much earlier, during the dig itself, and was paid for mainly by the Beersheba municipality.

That matters for what a visitor should expect. Original masonry does not survive to any height here, and anyone hoping for standing ruins will be disappointed. What it offers instead is legibility: an entire town plan you can walk in an hour, with the modern intervention labelled rather than disguised. Reconstruction of that sort is contested in conservation practice, and Tel Be'er Sheva sits at the honest end of it.

The mound was still being fortified in the twentieth century. In the First World War the Ottoman army used Beersheba as a staging area against the Suez Canal and put a gun position on top of the tel; it was taken on 31 October 1917. The parks authority's own two accounts of that day differ, the brochure crediting an ANZAC infantry unit and the website ANZAC cavalry, and the Australian War Memorial's account describes light horsemen of the 4th and 12th Regiments charging the Turkish trenches and entering the town in under an hour. At the foot of the observation tower are the remains of a diamond-shaped Roman fortress of the second or third century CE, restored in the Early Arab period.