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Radiocarbon Dating

How To Find Your True Love

By Hershel Shanks

Are you single and looking for your true love? Someone thought the conference I recently attended at Oxford was the answer: Radiocarbon dating was the way to find the perfect match. Radiocarbon would identify just the right person for you. The story, of course, is apocryphal. The real purpose of the radiocarbon conference was, of course, to solve one of the most contentious dating puzzles in current Biblical archaeology—the absolute dates of several archaeological layers, or strata, as they are called. The subtext, rarely mentioned at the conference, however, was the question of whether King Solomon’s reign was […]

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Endnotes

1.

Amihai Mazar, Ephraim Stern, Amnon Ben-Tor, all of Hebrew University; Lawrence Stager of Harvard; William Dever and Seymour Gitin, the former and present directors of the Albright Institute in Jerusalem; and even Baruch Halpern, co-director with Finkelstein and David Ussishkin of the current excavation of Megiddo.

2.

Ephraim Stern, recently retired as director of the Tel Dor excavation, has been succeeded by Ilan Sharon who, joined by Dor-staffer Ayelet Gilboa, now supports the low chronology.