Inside BAR
It was a perfect match: King Solomon provided the labor and access to the Red Sea, and the Phoenician ruler Hiram offered his people’s sailing skills and Cedars of Lebanon with which to build ships. Together they created a mighty Israelite naval force based at “Ezion-Geber which is near Eloth” (2 Kings 9:26). But where was Ezion-Geber? The location of Solomon’s seaport has been a matter of scholarly debate for half a century, since 1938 when the American archaeologist and rabbi Nelson Glueck excavated Tell el-Kheleifeh, at the northern end of the Gulf of Eilat/Aqabah and identified it as Ezion-Geber. Glueck’s claim was eventually disproved, and the field opened to new candidates. In “Is This Solomon’s Seaport?” Alexander Flinder suggests an island gem as the Biblical port—picturesque Jezirat Faraun, in the Gulf of Eilat/Aqabah, a few miles south of modern Eilat. Flinder uses maritime and architectural clues, both above and below the water, to identify fortifications, an enclosed harbor and a natural anchorage between the island and the mainland.
A Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Flinder lives in London with his wife Trudie, a magistrate in London Court. Underwater military experience in Africa and Burma during World War II and an interest in classical architecture led him to become one of England’s pioneers of underwater archaeology after the war. Flinder’s Secrets of the Bible Seas—An Underwater Archaeologist in the Holy Land (Severn House, 1985) was reviewed in Books in Brief, BAR 14:05.
In the ancient Near East, even cult figurines often got a decent burial. Because of their sacred quality, cult figurines could not be simply thrown away after they had served their purpose. Instead they were buried, probably with a ceremony, in pits called favissae. When Ephraim Stern uncovered two favissae in his dig at Tel Dor, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, the discovery inspired him to make a study of ancient Near Eastern cult figurines. From this study, he gained a startling insight, important to identifying Israelite sites in the post-Exilic period, as he details in “What Happened to the Cult Figurines? Israelite Religion Purified After the Exile.”
Born in Haifa, Israel, Stern studied for both undergraduate and doctoral degrees at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His doctoral dissertation, “The Material Cultures of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period,” became a prize-winning book—one kudo was the 1984 BAS Publication Award for best scholarly book on archaeology. Since 1980, Stern has directed the excavation at Tel Dor. Before Dor, he directed the dig at nearby Tel Mevorakh, which he has dubbed Tel Dor’s “daughter.” In “Excavations at Tel Mevorakh Are Prelude to Tel Dor Dig,” BAR 05:03, Stern explains that the smaller Tel Mevorakh was occupied mainly “when Dor was an important regional center and powerful enough to protect her ‘daughter.’”
Everyone agrees that the tragic plundering of antiquities from ancient sites is devastating to the world’s historical heritage. Unfortunately, the lack of agreement among authorities about how to stop this plundering only prolongs and compounds the problem. A practical solution must involve points of law and economics, subjects in which archaeologists usually have little expertise. In “The Rampant Rape of Israel’s Archaeological Sites,” BAR 15:02, Israeli archaeologists David Ilan, Uzi Dahari and Gideon Avni demanded that all antiquities sales in Israel be outlawed. In this issue, Alan C. Leventen applies his expert knowledge of the legal mechanisms of free-market economics to the problem and offers “A Workable Proposal to Regulate Antiquities Trade.”
A veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, Leventen is currently managing director of Balfour Maclaine Futures, Inc., a New York based brokerage firm. He also serves as adjunct professor of international financial relations at Columbia University. Leventen’s interest in archaeology stems from his involvement in ancient numismatics, particularly coins of Biblical Judea.
In the May/June BAR (“At Least Publish the Dead Sea Scrolls Timetable!” BAR 15:03), editor Hershel Shanks challenged the Israel Department of Antiquities to make public their timetable for the long overdue publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A timetable arrived at the BAR office, and it appears in “Dead Sea Scrolls Scandal—Israel’s Department of Antiquities Joins Conspiracy to Keep Scrolls Secret.” The timetable, says Shanks, is “a hoax and a fraud”: nonspecific, nonbinding and with no provision for oversight. It’s time, Shanks concludes, to stop waiting for publication and allow scholars access to the hundreds of scroll fragments still unpublished and locked up in Jerusalem’s Rockefeller Museum.
Have you ever visited a city and wondered if it had an archaeological exhibit on view at the time? Or have you wanted to plan a trip to coincide with a major traveling exhibit? Our newest department, Museum Guide, will help you on both counts. Each issue will list current exhibits in the U.S. and Canada. To make this department even more useful, once a year, in the autumn, we will include a survey of the most important permanent archaeological holdings in North American museums. We’ll do the same for museums around the world each spring.
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