Juan Manuel Tebes

• Faculty Member at Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina

Interview in The Jordan Times (Amman), by Saeb Rawashdeh, March 8 2025. https://jordantimes.com/news/local/unveiling-10th-century-bc-copper-boom-breakthroughs-technology-khirbat-nahas

Interview in The Jordan Times (Amman), by Saeb Rawashdeh, April 16 2024. https://jordantimes.com/news/local/ancient-cultic-architecture-focusing-syro-arabian-shrines’-structures

Interview in The Jordan Times (Amman), by Saeb Rawashdeh, March 27 2024. https://www.jordantimes.com/news/local/deep-dive-ancient-pilgrimage-routes-levant-hijaz-regions

The final report on the Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project concludes that local nomadic tribes created a complex polity at early Iron Age Faynan, in southern Jordan, that was responsible for a radical shift in copper production to an industrial scale. Erez Ben-Yosef has subsequently used these conclusions as the key example in a theoretical...

This article makes a reassessment of the evidence concerning the practice of sacred travels (pilgrimage) in the arid southern Levant and northern Arabia in the first mill. BCE/CE, exploring their relationship with the biblical wilderness sojourn traditions. Sacred travels constituted a significant element in the religious and afterlife world of the...

Lecture in the Seminar "Crossing Ancient Sacred Landscapes: Contacts and Continuities in the Ancient Desert Cults and Beliefs of Northern Arabia and the Arid Southern Levant", Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, December 5-6 2023. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZabPWOBBJEA&list=PL0NmHAD4hO0UefBgaxIeCFbXVp_CauBc-&ind...

Midian was an ancient region located in northwestern Arabia. Compared with other peoples of the ancient Near East, knowledge about Midian and the Midianites is limited and restricted to a few and relatively late written sources, particularly the Hebrew Bible. The exact geographical location of the Midianites is unknown, and although the Midianite “...

Crossing different landscapes and periods has been a major feature of the desert cults and beliefs of the Middle East, from prehistory to modern times. This seminar aims to study the sacred landscapes of northern Arabia and the southern arid margins of the Levant in ancient times throughout the longue durée, adopting an interdisciplinary approach a...

Hebrew version of "Why the Bible Is Mute about Qos, the Edomite God". TheTorah.com (2022). https://thetorah.co.il/article/why-the-bible-is-mute-about-qos-the-edomite-god

La Bible hébraïque parle très peu de la religion d'Édom et ne dit rien de Qos, la principale divinité édomite, contrairement aux nombreuses allusions bibliques à d'autres dieux transjordaniens. À partir de ce manque surprenant de références, plusieurs chercheurs ont suggéré que le culte de Yahvé était connu à Édom ou que Qos et Yahvé partageaient d...

Research Assistant Oriental Institute, Pusey Lane, Oxford, OX1 2LE Reporting to Professor Juan Manuel Tebes (Principal Investigator), the post holder will be a member of the research project Decoding the Ancient Sacred Landscapes of the Arid Southern Levant (Southern Jordan/Israel), funded by the British Academy. The project aims studies sacred la...

The Hebrew Bible contains several references to 1st-millennium-BCE Arabian place names and peoples from a wide area along the South Arabian incense trade routes, particularly concentrated in the northern Hejaz, the Syro-Arabian Desert, and the Negev.

En la Biblia hebrea no existe ninguna referencia directa al dios edomita/idumeo Qos, a pesar de la plétora de evidencias epigráficas y arqueológicas que nos hablan del culto de esta deidad durante todo el primer milenio a. C. Esto ha llevado a algunos estudiosos a sugerir que los cultos de Israel y Edom estaban estrechamente relacionados, e inclusi...

El primer milenio a.C. constituyó un punto de inflexión para las sociedades que vivían en el norte de Arabia y los márgenes áridos del sur del Levante. Por primera vez en su historia, los pueblos locales se organizaron en entidades políticas independientes como Edom, Taima, Dedán y otras diversas confederaciones tribales árabes.

The chapter provides an overview of the societies that inhabited the arid regions of the southern Levant and northern Arabia during the first half of the first millennium BC. This period was a turning point in the history of the local populations, since they organized themselves for the first time into independent polities of differing levels of so...

Why the Bible Is Mute about Qos, the Edomite God Esau, Jacob's twin brother, is the ancestor of Edom, Israel's southern neighbor. The Edomites worshiped the god Qos/Qaus, who emerged around the same time and place as YHWH in the Late Bronze Age, and who was very popular in Persian Period Yehud. And yet, unlike other foreign gods, the Bible never me...

Located in modern southwestern Jordan, Edom is the least known of the peoples of the Iron Age southern Levant. Until recently, the history of the Edomites was based mostly on the biblical text, a few references in Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources, and the very limited number of epigraphic inscriptions found in the region. However, recent archaeolo...

We all know that Yahweh was, first and foremost, ancient Israel's God. Yet, even after hundreds of years of archaeology and biblical scholarship, we know very little about his origins—and how he came to be worshiped by the peoples of Israel and Judah. Scholars have searched for the name Yahweh in ancient West Semitic texts, especially those found a...

The chronology of Khirbet en-Nahas, a large Iron Age archaeological site located in the copper mining region of Faynan, southern Jordan, has been under fierce debate for the last 15 years. Since the site was excavated in 2002–2009, several analyses challenged the excavators' interpretation of the stratigraphy, the results of the radiocarbon data an...

Five extra-mural shrines dated to the Late Bronze/Iron Ages have been excavated in the arid areas south and south-east of the Levant (Negev and south-central Transjordan). Although they present features congruent with the long tradition of local desert cultic architecture, most previous treatments of these shrines have focused on their relationship...

We know very little about the southern Levantine god Qos, a deity with a long history throughout the first millennium BCE, worshipped especially by Edomites and Idumaeans, and known in Nabataea, northern Arabia, and Hellenistic Egypt. Several scholars have suggested that Qos and Yahweh shared similar features, if not were the same deity, although m...

Au cours de l'âge du bronze récent, l'utilisation du nom Édom était plus fréquente qu'on ne le pense ; en fait, deux endroits appelés Édom sont connus dans cette période, un situé dans le sud du Levant et autre dans le nord de Canaan.

This entry focuses on the religions in the northern Hejaz and neighboring regions during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages and later (ca. 1500-300 BCE), the first time when there is firm archaeological and epigraphic evidence of local cultic practices.

The Midianite-Kenite hypothesis, the idea that the pre-Israelite roots of Yahwism can be traced back to the areas south and southeast of Palestine, has a long pedigree in biblical scholarship. Analyses supporting this view generally agree in three main points. First, they assume that the influence of the southern cultic practices on Yahwism occurre...

This special issue publishes most of the contributions of a three-day workshop of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg "Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe" held on July 2019 at the Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum. It seeks to explore and contextualize the configuration of the varied desert cultic practices from t...

This study aims to interpret the recent radiocarbon datings of lime-based mortars from hydraulic structures of the archaeological site of as-Sila, in the northern Edomite plateau (Jordan). These radiocarbon dates suggest three main chronological horizons throughout a long period of time, but their interpretation is a difficult task. They present pr...

The societal changes that occurred in north-western Arabia and the arid southern Levant between the mid-second and the beginning of the first millennia BCE were so profound that they can be characterized, borrowing Steven Rosen´s terminology, as a "desert revolution." This article will review the archaeological and epigraphic evidence of the Late B...

It is well known that the Nabataeans adopted and modified foreign cultic and funerary practices for their own religious purposes, particularly from the Greco-Roman and Egyptian worlds. However, their origins and precedents lie in the millennia-old cultural heritage of the peoples of the southern arid margins of the Levant and northern Arabia. This...

Use and intermittent visits to funerary and afterlife-related cultic structures played a significant role in the afterlife-world of the nomadic, semi-pastoral population that lived in the southern Levantine and Syro-Arabian arid margins for several millennia. This paper intends to analyze the archaeological evidences of mortuary structures and afte...

Revolutionary changes in the ancient Near East have usually been associated with the agricultural and urban societies in the Fertile Crescent - recall the long-held notions of "Neolithic revolution" and "Urban revolution." But often the semi-pastoral nomadic societies in the desert regions were, and still are, seen as inherently conservative and un...

While the impact of wars and national humiliations in the ancient Jewish cultural nationalism has been studied extensively, little has been written about the role of the related phenomena of cultures of resentment against foreigners or minority groups. Well before the Hellenistic period, the Jewish tradition had already created its own perfect enem...

Review of: Lemardelé, C. 2019. Archéologie de la Bible hébraïque. Culture scribale et Yahwismes. Oxford.

The name Midian instantly brings to mind images of barren desert landscapes, camel caravans crossing vast arid wastelands, and, above all, the land of Moses’s exile where he received for the first time Yahweh’s revelation.

Nunca como en los últimos años la arqueología del Medio Oriente ha estado en el epicentro de las noticias. Los sangrientos conflictos sectarios en Siria e Irak han sido el caldo de cultivo para la destrucción y el saqueo de sus antiquísimos patrimonios históricos. Sin embargo, el bombardeo diario de noticias ha invisibilizado el formidable patrimon...

This conference seeks to explore and contextualize the configuration of the varied desert cultic practices from the southern Levant and northern Arabia during the Late Bronze/Iron Ages that may have contributed to the emergence of the Yahwistic cult. Recent archaeological excavations in the Negev, southern Transjordan and Hejaz and new interpretati...

The southern arid regions of the Levant were central for the development of the ancient traditions of Israel and Judah. Their history is inextricably linked with the history of settlement, contacts and trade of the Negev, Sinai and Edom during the Late Bronze/Iron Ages. This article will investigate the configuration of the varied desert cultic pra...

The Mesha Inscription (MI) or Moabite Stone is an inscribed black basalt stone (a stela) dating to the ninth century BCE and now exhibited in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. It was found in 1868 in Dhiban (the ancient Dibon), a village located in central Transjordan east of the Dead Sea, an area known in biblical times as the land of Moab. The survivin...

Bowls, cooking pots, and other seemingly common vessels tell a long story of ethnic boundaries, social hierarchies, and class camaraderie, but they also reveal shared ritual values across different ethnic communities in ancient Edom (and later Idumaea), and their ancient Judaean (and later Jewish) counterparts in the Negev.

During the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, the vast arid areas of the southern Levant, northwestern Arabia and Sinai were inhabited by populations whose main way of living was nomadic herding and trade, small-scale agriculture and occasional mining, complemented with a few settled centers. The nomadic, non-literate communities have been traditionally st...

Among the geographical narratives of the book of Numbers stand two toponym descriptions that include place-names in the Sinai Peninsula and the Negev Desert: Num 33:5-49, an account of the itinerary of the Exodus with new toponym material; and Num 34:1-12, a description of the borders of the land of Canaan as told by Yahweh. Both texts have been la...

Review of: Schmidt, B.B., 2016. The Materiality of Power: Explorations in the Social History of Early Israelite Magic. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 105. Tübingen.

Se cumplen 50 años de la Guerra de los Seis Días y mucho se ha hablado sobre el conflicto que cambió completamente el balance de poder político-militar en el Medio Oriente. Poco se habla, sin embargo, sobre la importancia que tuvo la guerra en el desarrollo de la arqueología local y en su intensa imbricación con el conflicto árabe-israelí.

A más de 40 años de su nacimiento, las aproximaciones desde los sistemas-mundo y los enfoques de los vínculos centro-periferia proveen aún un marco adecuado para el análisis de interrelaciones políticas, económicas y culturales de toda índole, tanto en la modernidad como en el mundo antiguo. Aunque esta teoría fue inicialmente postulada para explic...

Encyclopedia articles of “Bamah (high place)” and “Standing Stones (mazzebot)”.

La hipótesis madianita-quenita, que refiere a la idea de que las raíces preisraelitas del yahvismo se remontan a las zonas al sur y sureste de Palestina, tiene una larga tradición en los estudios bíblicos. Los investigadores que apoyan esta teoría están de acuerdo, en general, en tres puntos principales. En primer lugar, asumen que la influencia de...

Le Cylindre Rassam (Prisme A), en racontant la campagne transjordanienne d'Assurbanipal contre les Arabes, mentionne deux noms de lieux localisés dans Édom: "dans le girâ d'Az/sarilu, Hiratâqaz/saya dans Édom". L'analyse effectuée sert à trouver l'étymologie probable dans le monde des langues ouest-sémitiques du Ier mill. av.n.è. Ces toponymes sont...

El rol de Edom en la tradición judía antigua constituye un caso único en el estudio de las memorias colectivas de la antigüedad. Su longevidad a lo largo de varios siglos, su perseverancia en diferentes contextos históricos y su visibilidad en fuentes escritas de diverso tipo lo diferencian de otras culturas antiguas de resentimiento. Detrás de la...

Este artículo introductorio presenta una evaluación del análisis de sistemas-mundo como una perspectiva útil para examinar dinámicas sociales de interrelaciones políticas, económicas y culturales en el largo plazo y a gran escala territorial en el antiguo Cercano Oriente durante el II y I milenio a.C.

Durante el segundo y el primero milenio a. C. las vastas zonas áridas del sur del Levante, el noroeste de Arabia y el Sinaí estuvieron habitadas por poblaciones cuya principal forma de vida era el pastoreo nómada y la agricultura a pequeña escala. Estas comunidades ágrafas dejaron un enorme registro de arte rupestre, y su estudio, y el de la iconog...

Syro-Palestinian archaeology has been traditionally slow to incorporate the terminology, discussions and methods developed in mainstream world archaeology. Fortunately, the recent decades have seen a burst of studies trying to understand old and new archaeological data through the lenses of social theory. The history of scholarship on the emergence...

Tanto para judíos como para musulmanes el Monte del Templo forma parte integral de sus convicciones religiosas. Pero lo que le otorga a este sitio una significación especial es la intensa imbricación de estos sentimientos con las disputas nacionales entre árabes e israelíes.

This is the second article of two studies investigating the Iron Age painted pottery traditions of the Northern Hejaz and Southern Levant: the Qurayyah/Midianite pottery; Taymanite/Sana'iye pottery; Edomite/Busayra Painted Ware/Southern Transjordanian-Negev Pottery (STNP); and al-'Ula/Khuraybah pottery. The first article focused on the chronology,...

Review of: Levy, T.E., M. Najjar and E. Ben-Yosef (eds.) 2014. New Insights into the Iron Age Archaeology of Edom, Southern Jordan. Monumenta Archaeologica 35. Los Angeles.

Buried beneath the houses of Silwan, a small neighborhood south of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, lie the remains of four thousand years of human history. As elsewhere in the Middle East, in Silwan history is counted by ages. But the key to this site, what sets it apart most prominently from other places in this part of the world, lies in...

Most biblical scholars clearly portray Yahwism as if it arose in a vacuum in the southern arid areas to the south of Palestine, with no previous history and no geographical links with neighboring areas. To the contrary, the Iron Age phenomena are only one chain, and a continuation, of a long sequence of cultic practices with a history of thousands...

Short interview in the newspaper La Nación (Buenos Aires), by Raquel San Martín, April 26 2015.

Past Horizons, June 2015.

The arid areas of the Negev and Edom played a prominent role in the socio-economic and cultural development of the Iron Age civilizations of the southern Levant and northwestern Arabia, being at the interface of key trade routes, providing essential resources and developing cultic practices that spread to neighbouring regions. This volume comprises...

Painted representations of schematic human figures and birds, identified as ostriches, are one of the hallmarks of the Qurayyah Pottery. This paper studies possible parallels with human and avian iconography in the pottery, rock art and reliefs of the southern Levant, Arabia and northeastern Africa. It is concluded that the Qurayyah Pottery iconogr...

This paper studies how changes in the Iron Age world-system affected the economy and society of Edom, the Negev and the northern Hejaz. Contrary to traditional studies, which have failed to recognise how different local peoples were from modern nation-states, and the "tribal kingdom" model, which has stressed the tribe as a static, almost non-histo...

Interview in Mediterráneo Antiguo.com, by Mario Agudo Villanueva (2014).

Thanks to an ASOR Platt Fellowship I was able to participate in the 2013 season of the Barqa Landscape Project (BLP), Jordan, directed by Dr. Russell B. Adams (University of Waterloo, Canada). My participation in this project stemmed from my interest in the archaeology and history of the southern arid margins of the Levant during the Iron Age – the...

This paper studies the painted pottery traditions of first-millennium BC north-western Arabia and the arid margins of the southern Levant (Qurayyah, Tayma, Edomite/STNP, and al-'Ula wares) in light of the recent archaeological research in the area. The local painted wares were part of a larger cultural substratum, given their sharing of certain fea...

This work comprises several studies dealing with the society, economy, ideology and power among the mainly tribal, semi-pastoral communities living and moving around the southern arid margins of the southern Levant, particularly the Negev desert, southern Transjordan (ancient Edom) and north-eastern Sinai during the first millennium BCE. All studie...

Review of: AAVV, Un desafío intelectual lationamericano: Raúl Prebisch en el análisis de sus contemporáneos. Buenos Aires, Fundación Raúl Prebish & Fundación Foro del Sur, 2013; J.G. Williamson, Comercio y pobreza: Cuándo y cómo comenzó el atraso del Tercer Mundo. Libros de Historia. Barcelona, Crítica, 2012; D. Acemoglu y J.A. Robinson, Why Nation...

This article investigates the biblical tradition of the Edomite intervention in the fall and destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 586 BCE. Close re-reading of the relevant biblical passages stripped of the ethnic prejudice against the Edomites demonstrates that the texts reproaching the Edomite behavior are not contemporary to the events they...

En 586 a.C. el ejército babilónico de Nabucodonosor tomó la ciudad de Jerusalén, y el consiguiente saqueo, incendio y destrucción son aún recordados como el epitome de toda catástrofe nacional. La mayoría de los historiadores que han estudiado el tema, siguiendo lo relatado principalmente por las fuentes bíblicas, han cargado el peso de la culpa en...

This paper studies the pottery of Jerusalem corresponding to the very Late Iron II (mid 7th to early 6th centuries BCE) that is scattered throughout the modern-day excavation reports. A typology of five functional groups and twenty-five taxonomic subgroups is built, based on pottery retrieved from clear loci that represent the Neo-Babylonian destru...

This paper makes a reassessment of the Southern Transjordan-Negev Pottery (STNP), traditionally known as ‘Edomite’ ware, discovered in archaeological sites in the Negev and southern Transjordan dating to the Late Iron Age. It is built upon three main parts: building a typology of the STNP in the Negev, focusing on both their functional and taxonomi...

During my fellowship at the Albright, I investigated the three local pottery traditions that existed in the Negev, southern Transjordan and northwestern Hejaz during the Iron Age, known as Qurayyah (also Midianite ware), Negevite and Edomite wares. My research focused on the main characteristics of these wares (form, decorations, iconography and pr...

During my fellowship at the Albright, I investigated the three local pottery traditions that existed in the Negev, southern Transjordan and northwestern Hejaz during the Iron Age (ca 1200-600 BCE), known as Qurayyah (also Midianite ware), Negevite and Edomite wares. My research focused on the main characteristics of these wares (form, decorations,...

It might be argued that, given the limits in our knowledge on the events that took place in ancient Israel’s southern periphery during the Iron Age, a World-System view is fully inadequate for explaining the historical processes going on in the local societies. Nothing is further from the truth. I would suggest that the World-System theory is the o...

There is no doubt that the World-System model – with its focus on core and peripheral societies, and the long- and short-term processes that shaped their histories and relationships – serves as a useful tool to chart the socio-political fluctuations of ancient Israel’s southern neighbors. However, given the complexities and on-going changes in the...

The history of ancient Israel’s southern neighbors – for our purposes, those societies living in the Syro-Arabian periphery, that region comprising the arid, fringe areas of the modern states of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia and forming part of the Mediterranean World-System since the Late Bronze Age – has been traditionally a secondary field of s...