Solomonic Gates

1 Kings 9:15 says Solomon raised forced labour to build "the House of the Lord, his own house, the Millo, the wall of Jerusalem, and Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer." In the 1950s Yigael Yadin, excavating Hazor, found a city gate with six chambers, three on each side of the passage, flanked by towers and joined to a casemate wall. He recognised the same plan in a gate excavated at Megiddo by the University of Chicago in the 1930s, and in R. A. S. Macalister's published plan of Gezer, where the gate had been taken for a "Maccabean castle"; William Dever's later excavations at Gezer exposed it fully. Three nearly identical gates, Yadin argued, showed one royal architect at work and confirmed the verse.

The gates became the classic example of biblical archaeology. Since the 1990s Israel Finkelstein's "low chronology" has moved such buildings into the 9th century, under the Omride kings of Israel, while others defend the 10th-century date with pottery and radiocarbon results. Six-chambered gates have also been found at other sites such as Ashdod and Lachish, so the debate over their date and builder continues.