Four room house

A four room house, also known as an "Israelite house" or a "pillared house" is the name given to the mud and stone houses characteristic of the Iron Age of Levant. Although sometimes considered particularly Israelite, they are also found in non-Israelite sites.(A. Mazar, 1985a: 67-8; Finkclstein, 1988: 237-59)." Their origins are uncertain. The house's inhabitants lived on the second floor, the ground floor being used as a stable for , and for storage. The four room house is so named because its floor plan, divided into four sections; it is also sometimes called a pillared house because three ground-level "rooms" are separated by two rows of wood pillars holding up the second floor. The pillars, however, are not the defining feature of the four roomed house, and this error of terminology leads to the confusion of four roomed houses with other buildings such as storehouses and stables, where pillars were widely used, but which were not constructed under the four room house layout.

There were multiple variations on the basic four room house, such as where the rooms were divided into smaller areas, as well as five, three, and two room models. Acknowledging these sub-types of the four room house, the popularity of the structure started at the beginning of Iron Age I (end of the eleventh century BC) and dominated the architecture of Israel through Iron Age II until the Babylonian Exile. After the destruction of Judah (of the seventh and sixth centuries BC) the architecture type was no longer utilized.

There have been multiple theories on why the four room house construction was so popular. Architectural analysis can be made of the residential units by the way they are grouped, the relationship between structures, their size, internal divisions, and the size and structure of the families that inhabited them. Various points can be made about the four room house pertaining to the culture of their inhabitants. Disparity in house sizes and build quality within towns seem to be a result of socio-economic stratification within cities. Four roomed houses are found in isolation or built in clusters of grouped units. It can be observed that smaller urban houses, that shared walls between, them were most likely inhabited by nuclear families, while the larger stand-alone houses belonged to extended and wealthy families such as the urban elite. Through the analysis of space syntax within the four room house, it can be said that the four room house reflects an egalitarian ideology. The typical four room house had a layout where all the inner rooms were directly accessible from the house’s central space, suggesting that all rooms were equal and there was no hierarchy to the space. The four room house was unlike the typical Canaanite-Phoenician dwelling had a layout where some rooms could be entered only by passing through other rooms, which showed a hierarchy of access.

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