Sometimes, an archaeological find screams “don’t go in there”. Tel Shimron definitely has a find that meets that criterion:
Archaeologists excavating the Bronze Age acropolis at Tel Shimron in northern Israel have been digging a massive and extremely enigmatic building this summer. With walls up to four meters thick, the huge mud-brick construction housed no room or other large space within, but only a single tight passageway only wide enough to let one person through at a time.
Eager to discover what it led to, the archaeologists freed the corridor of thousands of years of sediment that had filled it, and progressively followed the passageway deeper and deeper underground.
Last month they hit paydirt. Well, at least some kind of paydirt.
After a sharp left turn at the rear of this mysterious building, the corridor broadens to a monumental arch, perfectly preserved after nearly 4,000 years despite being made of fragile sun-dried mudbricks.
The joint expedition by Wheaton College and Tel Aviv University is hailing the arch as a rare find, one of few examples of this architectural feature to have survived this long in the Levant.
“I’m going to spend the next few years convincing my students that this is not archaeology,” jokes Prof. Daniel Master, an archaeologist at Wheaton who co-heads the dig. “You just don’t find huge, intact, vaulted passageways you can just walk through.”
“For once, I am speechless,” adds co-director Dr. Mario Martin of Tel Aviv. “It’s an extraordinary discovery in an extraordinary state of preservation.”
But the purpose of the arch and the massive building that houses it remains a mystery for now. source: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2023-08-17/ty-article/archaeologists-find-perplexing-4-000-year-old-canaanite-arch-in-northern-israel/00000189-fcfa-d9d1-a79b-fffbab460000
That’s not the thing screaming do not go in there, though. What does that is that the stairs lead directly to a bricked up wall:
If this were an Indiana Jones movie, the blocked passageway would quite naturally lead to a golden idol, which, once removed, would trigger an elaborate set of deadly traps.
Reality is often more boring (fortunately for the archaeologists), but Master and colleagues do suspect the building and archway may have had some cultic function. This is suggested by the discovery inside the corridor, just before its sharp left turn into the arch, of a seven-cupped bowl (also called a Nahariya bowl, from its type site in northern Israel), a kind of pottery vessel known to have been used for ritual offerings in the Middle Bronze. source: ibid
Shimron has the connotation of to guard, or guardian. It is possible that whatever happened here, the message was “Do not EVER go in here and worship in this manner again”. What is interesting is that this happened before Moses came there in the common understanding of his arrival. Something interesting must have been afoot, considering that making idols seemed to be in vogue at that point…