Another View: Don’t Be So Quick to be Disappointed, David Ussishkin

Home > Magazines > BAR > March/April 2008

In the November/December issue of BAR, David Ussishkin expressed his disappointment at what he thought to be the disappearance of two royal Israelite king burialsa that I had identified in the July/August issue.b I want to reassure him and other BAR readers that there really are tombs below King Omri’s palace at Samaria. I will deal first with Ussishkin’s comments regarding Tomb A. Ussishkin expects this ninth-century B.C.E. Israelite tomb to resemble eighth- and seventh-century B.C.E. Judahite tombs (complete with a burial shelf, a Hathor headrest and a bone repository below the burial bench). It does not. Very clear, […]

Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

David Ussishkin, “The Disappearance of Two Royal Burials,” BAR, November/December 2007.

Norma Franklin, “Lost Tombs of the Israelite Kings,” BAR, July/August 2007.

See Gabriel Barkay and Amos Kloner, “Jerusalem Tombs from the Days of the First Temple,” BAR, March/April 1986.

Endnotes

Irit Yezerski, “Burial-Cave Distribution and the Borders of the Kingdom of Judah Toward the End of the Iron Age,” Tel Aviv 26 (1999), pp. 253–270.

David Ussishkin, The Village of Silwan: The Necropolis from the Period of the Judahite Kingdom (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and the Israel Exploration Society, 1993).

Yves Calvet, “The House of Urtenu,” Near Eastern Archaeology 63 (2000), pp. 210–211.

See Victor A. Hurowitz, “Burial in the Bible,” Beit Mikra 45 (2000), pp. 121–145 (Hebrew).