The So-Called Lehi Cave

The So-Called Lehi Cave

Editor’s Note: For nearly three decades Latter-day Saint audiences, especially travelers in Israel, have been told by some lecturers and tour guides about “Lehi’s Cave” at a place called Khirbet Beit Lei about 20 miles southwest of Jerusalem. Some church members have claimed that evidence found there shows that it is the spot where the sons of Lehi stopped when they fled from Jerusalem and from the servants of Laban, according to 1 Nephi 3:26–27. In 1982 Dr. LaMar C. Berrett, author of a widely circulated book, Discovering the World of the Bible, published an evaluation of these claims through FARMS.¹ Yet many Latter-day Saints are not acquainted with his critique. This short article summarizes what he found out about the Khirbet Beit Lei and the claim that Nephi and his brothers stopped there.

In 1961 a road-building project by the government of Israel uncovered an ancient burial complex at Khirbet Beit Lei during construction in the area which is ten miles west- northwest of Hebron. Professor Joseph Naveh, an archaeologist at Hebrew University, excavated the site for the Israeli government’s Department of Antiquities.² He found a cave consisting of three chambers that anciently had been cut into the chalky limestone. The two inner rooms contained eight skeletons that lay on “benches” of limestone that had been left around the sides of the chambers. The entrance had been blocked by large stones. A ring, a bronze earring, and a bronze plaque the only articles found with the skeletons.

Graffiti had been inscribed with a crude stylus on the walls of the central chamber. Three of these drawings show sketchy human figures ranging in height from 13 to 16 inches. In one, a man is shown holding what the archaeologist thought might be a musical instrument, a lyre. In a second, a man raises his arms, possibly in a prayer gesture. In a third spot, a deeply engraved figure of a man wears a strange headdress. The outlines of two sailing vessels were on another wall.

Various Hebrew letters were also scratched on the walls. Naveh’s attempt to read these was not very successful, but Professor Frank Moore Cross later analyzed them in more acceptable terms. One inscription is considered a plea for the deliverance of Jerusalem from some invader. Another constitutes a plea to be spared from guilt or punishment. The third takes the form of a prophetic oracle in which Yahweh [Jehovah] speaks in the first person and in poetic form. The statement has God affirming his acceptance and assurance of the redemption of Jerusalem and Judah in phrasing reminiscent of Jeremiah. Details of how the written characters are shaped indicate that probably all the writings in this chamber date from the sixth century BC

Cross thought the tomb was likely constructed in pre-exilic times (before 600 BC). Later the tomb complex was opened, and perhaps robbed, by the people who made the inscriptions. Those probably were “chance visitors, or . . . refugees or travelers who took shelter in the cave.” Cross considered it likely that the inscriptions were made by some refugee fleeing the Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar who conquered Judah and destroyed King Zedekiah’s Jerusalem in 586 BC (see 2 Kings 25:1–4; from the biblical city of Lachish, only a few miles to the west and in the same time frame, come the famous “Lachish Letters,” messages written on pieces of broken pottery that tell about the tense military situation as the Babylonians approached the area). Manuscripts and papyrus documents have been found that were left in other caves in the land of Judah by men at this same historical moment. (Cross chose to “suppress the temptation” he felt to suggest that the inscriptions at the burial chamber at Khirbet Beit Lei may have been the work of “a prophet or his amanuensis [scribe] fleeing Jerusalem,” apparently hinting at Jeremiah and his helper Baruch.)³

Mormon interest in this burial chamber has focused on six points:

1. The name, Khirbet Beit Lei, which means ruins of the house of Lei. Adherents of the view that Nephi visited here have supposed that the name Lei is a variant of Lehi. Two aged Arab residents of the vicinity claimed that an ancient prophet named “Lei” judged his people in that locality.
2. The presence of a “cave” near Jerusalem that could be the one to which Nephi and his brothers resorted according to 1 Nephi 3:27.
3. The date of the inscriptions has been judged to fall early in the century that followed 600 BC, which is about when Lehi and his family left Jerusalem.
4. The plea in one inscription for the deliverance and redemption of Jerusalem.
5. Inscribed prophetic statements in the first person, supposedly meaning that a prophet (Nephi?) was present.
6. Sketches of ships on the chamber walls; Nephi’s party later built a vessel and crossed the ocean.

While these points may look impressive initially, examination of each of them establishes that they do not provide convincing evidence for any connection with Nephi or his brothers.

Point 1. Indeed there was a district named “Lehi” (see Judges 15:9, 14, 19) in the hill country of Judah near Philistine territory, and this may have been in the neighborhood where Khirbet Beit Lei is located. When Samson killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone (Hebrew l i) of an ass (see Judges 15:17), he named an area there “Ramath-lehi,” meaning “the heights of lehi,” or “lifting up of the jawbone” or “casting away of the jawbone.” A nineteenth-century book mentions a village named “beit leyi” in this general area,⁴ although it is hard to imagine that the term leyi is derived from the district that Samson named. After all, we do not definitely know where that was located; moreover, that name was bestowed over three thousand years ago, and there is no documentation during the intervening centuries of the name in this vicinity or anywhere else in the land of Israel. During those millennia the Jews were twice driven out of the land, and the language spoken changed at least twice—from Hebrew to Aramaic at the time of Jesus and much later to Arabic. Besides, the recent Arab inhabitants of Khirbet Beit Lei have no cultural continuity with the Jews of the prophet Lehi’s day. Thus the name Lei and the language and culture of the inhabitants of the area have only the slimmest prospect of relating historically to anything connected with Lehi or Nephi. Moreover, Lehi wanted to get away from people at Jerusalem who had sought his life. Evidently, he did not want his departure to be publicly known lest his enemies pursue him, and nobody claims that he was personally at this cave. So how would his name have become associated with the site?

Point 2. Nothing in Nephi’s record suggests that the “cavity in a rock” to which the sons of Lehi fled (see 1 Nephi 3:26–27) was anything but a natural cave. The language Nephi uses does not fit a burial chamber hewed from soft limestone and shut up with skeletons inside, the case at Khirbet Beit Lei. Furthermore, the location of this tomb complex does not fit with Nephi’s account. It lies well to the southwest of Jerusalem. That would have been a strange direction for Nephi’s flight. This area was quite heavily populated, thus hardly the “wilderness” where their “cavity in a rock” was found. It made much more sense for them to head straight south from the capital city, back over the route (which has plenty of caves nearby) along which they had come from their father’s camp near the Red Sea. Besides, if Nephi and his companions had actually entered this tomb, and Laman and Lemuel had beaten their younger brothers in this place, it would be strange for archaeologists in 1961 to find the eight skeletons in an undisturbed condition in the tomb; we would expect them to be somewhat pushed aside at the very least.

Point 3. The timing is far from decisive. Surely other refugees besides Nephi and his brothers were moving about in the land of Judah at this same period of Babylonian disruption and could have stopped at this spot for temporary shelter. Anyhow, Naveh felt that the tomb might have been used at various times and that the inscriptions could have been put there well after Nephi’s day. Berrett documents in his paper that a number of features in the inscriptions (e.g., the lyre and outstretched arms and hands) were quite common in cave art in the land of Judah in the centuries after the Babylonian invasion.

Point 4. At the time of the Babylonian invasion (588–586 BC), it would be natural for many Jews to plead with Jehovah for deliverance of their sacred city. But Nephi would not have been one who would do so, for he was convinced that his father had been shown by revelation that wicked Jerusalem was justly doomed (see 1 Nephi 1:13). His brothers would not have written any such plea either, because they did not expect that the city would or even could be destroyed (see 1 Nephi 2:13; 7:7).

Point 5. Given the circumstances facing Nephi at the time he and his three brothers were in their cave refuge—the brothers beating and intimidating him (see 1 Nephi 3:28–29)—he would hardly have made things worse by asserting his standing as a prophet by writing a sacred message on the wall.

Point 6. There is no hint in Nephi’s record that at the time of the cave incident he or any in his family conceived that they would build a ship and cross the ocean. Only years later did the Lord reveal that information to them. In any case the conventional kind of sailing ship pictured in the inscriptions on the walls of the burial tomb at Khirbet Beit Lei seems not to have been the style of vessel that Nephi ended up building, for, he said, “neither did I build the ship after the manner of men . . . but . . . after the manner which the Lord had shown unto me” (1 Nephi 18:2).

Naveh felt that the ship shown in the tomb could be a symbol associated with death, a motif well known in Egyptian and other Near Eastern ritual, rather than a representation of a literal ship. Or perhaps the ships scratched on the wall here merely recalled sailing ships such as inhabitants of this area had seen only 20 miles away on the Mediterranean coast.

We would like more information about this site. But when what we do know is compared with what Nephi’s record tells us about the cave where they stopped, it is most unlikely, Berrett concludes, that the Khirbet Beit Lei site has any connection with the Book of Mormon. The limited coincidences that can be found between the site and Nephi’s account do not justify the tourist myth of “Lehi’s cave.”

Notes

1. LaMar C. Berrett, Discovering the World of the Bible (Provo, Utah: BYU Press, 1973); “The So-Called Lehi Cave” (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1982).
2. Joseph Naveh, “Old Hebrew Inscriptions in a Burial Cave,” Israel Exploration Journal 13/1 (1963).
3. Frank Moore Cross, “The Cave Inscriptions from Khirbet Beit Lei,” in Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Nelson Glueck, ed. James A. Sanders (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 299–304.
4. C. R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener, The Survey of Western Palestine [1883] (Jerusalem: Kedem, 1970), 274.