Strata
Attack Occurs near Archaeology Institute
A powerful bomb hidden inside a backpack at a Hebrew University dining hall killed nine people, including several Americans, and injured 84 others on July 31st. The terrorist attack occurred during a busy lunch hour at the Frank Sinatra International Student Center at the university’s Mt. Scopus campus. The cafeteria is near the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology and is frequently used by institute faculty and staff, as well as by visiting BAR editors. The Islamic terrorist group Hamas took responsibility for the attack.
One of the injured is the wife of an institute archaeologist; she was at the cashier when the bomb exploded but was not seriously harmed. Shortly after the explosion her husband sent BAR an e-mail listing several people from the institute who were present during the attack or shortly before. He concluded, “This was a horrible day for us. The parade of violence continues, and we see no end to it. We pray for better days.” A second Hebrew University archaeologist was in the field that day, but noted in an e-mail to BAR that he and his staff normally have lunch at the cafeteria at the time the bombing occurred. He added, “Life has turned into Russian roulette.”
Four Palestinians from East Jerusalem were subsequently arrested and charged with carrying out the bombing. As Jerusalem residents, the men were able to travel freely around Israel. Police officials believe the group was also responsible for several other major terrorist attacks, including the suicide bombing at the Moment Café in Jerusalem, which killed 11 people and injured 58; the suicide bombing in a pool hall in Rishon LeZion, near Tel Aviv, which killed 15 people and injured 45; and the planting of a bomb on a fuel tanker that blew up while the truck was being filled at Israel’s main fuel depot; no one was injured in the truck bombing, but a successful bombing at the depot could have killed thousands.
One of the men arrested, Mohammed Uda, worked as a painter at the Hebrew University campus. Police charge that he hid the explosives on the campus the night before the attack, took them the next day to the cafeteria and set off the explosion from afar with a cell phone. In a morbid twist, Uda was called after the bombing to help repair the damaged dining hall.
The victims of the bombing were Marla Bennett, 24, of San Diego, and Benjamin Blutstein, 25, of Susquehanna Township, Pennsylvania, both students; Dina Carter, 38, who was born in North Carolina and worked as a librarian at Israel’s National Library; Janis Ruth Coulter, 36, of Brooklyn, New York, an assistant director of Hebrew University’s foreign students department; David Gritz, 24, a student and an American citizen who grew up in Paris; David Diego Ladowski, 29, who was to leave shortly to serve in Israel’s embassy in Peru; Levina Shapira, 53, and Dafna Spruch, 61, both Hebrew University administrators; and Revital Barashi, 30, an adviser to university law students.
Best Articles in BAR Named
Robert Ousterhout’s “The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (in Bologna, Italy),” BAR 26:06, about a medieval replica of one of Jerusalem’s most sacred sites, has been named the best article to appear in BAR in 2000 and 2001. The article, published in the November/December 2000 issue, was selected by Andrea Berlin and Shlomo Bunimovitz, archaeologists and contributors to BAR. “Excavating the Tribe of Reuben,” BAR 27:02, by Larry G. Herr and Douglas R. Clark, has been named runner-up.
The 12th-century Santo Stefano complex in Bologna contains the most detailed copy of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to survive from the Middle Ages. Ousterhout argues that it is in fact more faithful to the original Holy Sepulchre than what stands on the Jerusalem site today! According to Ousterhout, the Jerusalem church that modern pilgrims visit is a “rabbit warren of historic rebuildings, scaffoldings and subdivisions, cluttered with relics, oversized candlesticks and overwhelmingly mediocre art.” The simpler Santo Stefano, on the other hand, displays features of the original church translated into beautiful Italian Romanesque style.
In giving the award to Ousterhout, Berlin and Bunimovitz write that his article “elegantly shows how the replica of the Jerusalem monument integrated the contemporary world view and … how it played a role not only in the religious world but also in the civic one.”
In “Excavating the Tribe of Reuben,” BAR 27:02, Herr and Clark argue that the ‘Umayri region in the Transjordan was settled in the Iron Age by the tribe of Reuben, not by the later Ammonites or Moabites. The Bible tells us that Reuben was allotted lands east of the Jordan River before the other Israelite tribes conquered the Canaanites (Joshua 13). Using the remains of an ‘Umayri four-room house as evidence, Herr and Clark conclude that the Biblical account is probably right. Our judges praise “the honest and fair manner of [Herr’s and Clark’s] presentation,” adding: “Few people paid much attention to Iron Age Jordan when the [Madaba Plains Project] began … Nonetheless, these scholars stuck with it.”
The Best of BAR award is made possible by the generous support of the Leopold and Clara M. Fellner Charitable Foundation, through its trustee Frederick L. Simmons, of Los Angeles.
Levi-Sala Prize Honors Three Senior Scholars
Three prominent scholars—Yaakov Meshorer, Ephraim Stern and William G. Dever—have been awarded the Irene Levi-Sala Book Prize for outstanding publications last year on the archaeology of Israel. Each author was nominated in a different category: Meshorer was recognized for lifetime achievement, while Stern won in the category of “substantial synthesis” and Dever took the popular non-fiction prize.
Meshorer, who established the numismatic division at the Israel Museum, has garnered international acclaim for his numerous publications on the ancient coinage of Palestine. His book, A Treasury of Jewish Coins from the Persian Period to Bar Kochba, surveys the entire range of ancient Jewish coinage.
The prize committee commended Meshorer for the “clarity and precision of the text,” and asserted that “this book crowns a distinguished career in the best possible way.”
Stern was honored for Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: The Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Periods, 732–332 B.C.E. (reviewed in ReViews, in this issue). Stern draws together in a single volume the archaeological evidence for all three periods. The committee praised his “scholarly approach, balanced perspective and scientific methods.”
Dever won the popular non-fiction award for What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? According to the committee, Dever’s book is “a landmark in the long-standing controversy” over the historicity of the Bible, as well as a “dynamic” and “stimulating” read.
Irene Levi-Sala, who specialized in prehistoric archaeology, died in 1991. The trust established in her memory is based at Ben-Gurion University. The prize committee was chaired by Eliezer Oren of Ben-Gurion University and included Sharon Herbert (University of Michigan), R. P. S. Moorey (Ashmolean Museum and Oxford University), Lawrence Stager (Harvard University) and David Ussishkin (Tel Aviv University).
Bible Study Software, Continued
Attention, Mac users! Last month’s review of Bible study software focused on programs for PCs. But there is also an outstanding Macintosh-based package on the market: Accordance, produced by OakTree Software.
Clearly designed and easy to manage, Accordance is suitable for novice and expert users alike. You can search through English, Hebrew and Greek books effortlessly, and cut and paste Hebrew and Greek text into word processor documents. If you’re viewing a text and want to see a certain Hebrew or Greek word in transliteration—or if you’re wondering how to parse it—an information window helpfully appears. Accordance also has a feature that translates Hebrew and Greek words into English.
One of the package’s standout features is its collection of animated maps. Click on a city or site, and you’ll be linked to a dictionary of place names (or, if it’s included in the package you buy, the Anchor Bible Dictionary). So, for example, you can “watch” the Exodus from Egypt on your computer screen. However, these maps aren’t terribly detailed—you couldn’t consult, say, a city plan of Jerusalem. Still, I’m willing to overlook this shortcoming on account of Accordance’s excellent Bible Lands PhotoGuide, which includes detailed, high-quality photographs of many interesting locations.
Impressively, Accordance is the only Bible study software to include Dead Sea Scrolls texts (in Hebrew and in English translation), as well as the Samaritan Pentatuech, the Greek version of the Apostolic fathers and the Mishnah. (It also features ten commonly used English translations of the Bible.) Though it includes many of the same study aids as other programs, it is not explicitly Christian (in fact, one version of Accordance has been designed specifically for a Jewish audience).
Accordance does have one disadvantage: Like other Macintosh-based programs, it can be time-consuming to install. Nevertheless, I would heartily recommend it to any student of the Bible. Macintosh users don’t have many options for Bible study software, but with Accordance, they won’t need any more.
Accordance costs $716 and runs on Macintosh OS computers operating on PowerMac (versions for older Macs and MACOSX are available). Contact OakTree Software, 498 Palm Springs Drive, Suite 100, Altamonte Springs, FL 32701, (877) 339–5855, www.OakSoft.com.
Writer Amy Dockser Marcus will deliver a free public lecture entitled “The Future of the Past: Archaeology and the Reshaping of the Middle East” on Friday, November 22 at 8 p.m., in the Grand Ballroom of the Marriott Eaton Center Hotel in Toronto. The lecture is presented by the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) as part of its outreach to the public during its annual meeting.
A former Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Marcus is the author of bestselling “The View from Nebo: How Archeology Is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East.” She has traveled to excavations and interviewed archaeologists in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. In her talk, she will explore how differing interpretations of archaeological findings affect the politics of the Middle East. For more information on the Marcus lecture or other ASOR events, visit www.asor.org.
Stateside, the University of Judaism in Los Angeles will host the last five lectures in its series, “Pushing Biblical Archaeology to Its Limits.” Speakers are Theodore W. Burgh, “Do You Hear What I Hear? Music in the Bible” (Oct. 28); Jodi Magness, “The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls” (Nov. 4); Jonathan L. Reed, “Excavating Jesus” (Nov. 11); Shelley Wachsmann, “Seafaring in Biblical Times: From Jonah’s Tashish Ship to the Boats of Galilean Fishermen” (Nov. 18); and Alan E. Bernstein, “Who Invented Hell? Where? When? Why?” (Dec. 2). Call (310) 440–1246 for more details.
A. Multicolored screws
B. Amphora (bottle) stoppers
C. Perfume wands
D. Earrings
What It Is, Is …
D. Earrings
These Egyptian earrings, measuring 1.1 inches and 1 inch long respectively, are made of opaque blue, yellow and white glass. They would have been inserted into pierced ear lobes and pushed back until the heads rested directly on the lobes. Scholars have suggested that the wearers of such earrings stuffed freshly cut flowers into the central cavities. This pair dates from the XVIIIth Dynasty (1350–1250 B.C.), when such screw-shaped ear “plugs” were very popular.
Earrings probably came to Egypt in the 16th century B.C., when black Africans (members of the Pan Grave culture) served as mercenaries for the Egyptians in the wars of liberation against the Hyksos, a Semitic people who ruled Egypt from about 1675 to 1550 B.C. Although glass was the favored material for earrings in Egypt, bone, ivory, gold, alabaster, faience and wood also were used.