The En Gedi Shrine and the Cave of the Treasure: Disentangling the Entangled

Two Judean Desert sites excavated in the early 1960s—the En Gedi Shrine and the Cave of the Treasure in Nahal Mishmar—assumed a prominent role in the scholarly discourse of Late Chalcolithic southern Levant. In 1971, David Ussishkin formulated what became a prevailing convention that linked the two sites, suggesting that the Nahal Mishmar hoard was an ephemeral cache of objects that originally served as the cultic paraphernalia of the En Gedi Shrine, hidden in the remote cave by the shrine’s caretakers at a time of distress. While reservations and alternative interpretations were raised over the years, this suggested connection was widely accepted in Late Chalcolithic scholarship and has been reconceptualized several times over the years. The present contribution maintains that the longstanding ties between En Gedi and Nahal Mishmar should be disentangled, and that the material dichotomy between En Gedi and the Judean Desert cliff caves (Nahal Mishmar included) implies that the two phenomena represent different chronological facies within the Late Chalcolithic Ghassulian culture.