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, and most notably, in ancient Israel and Judah.

The four-room house is so named because its floor plan is divided into four sections, although not all four are proper rooms, one often being an unroofed courtyard. It is also sometimes called a pillared house because two—or all three—of the parallel ground-level "rooms" are separated by one—or two, respectively—rows of wooden pillars. The pillars, however, are not the defining feature of the four-room house, and this error of terminology leads to the confusion of four-room 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. When an upper floor was included, the inhabitants used it as living quarters, while the ground floor was used as a stable for livestock and for storage. There were multiple variations on the basic four-room house. Some had a five-, three-, or two-room layout, and sometimes the rooms were divided by additional walls into smaller areas. Acknowledging these sub-types of the four-room house, the structure's popularity started during the Israelite highland settlement at the beginning of Iron Age I (late 11th century BCE) 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 BCE) the architecture type was no longer utilized.

Analysis

There have been multiple theories on why the four-room house construction was so popular.