BAR Puts Museum in Spotlight

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Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, founder and director of the Living Torah Museum in Brooklyn, New York, credits a BAR article^a with leading not only to a marked increase in visitors, including Christian visitors, but also to donations of important artifacts.

Rabbi Deutsch’s museum is one of the few institutions in this country devoted exclusively to Biblical archaeology. It is located in New York City’s Jewish Orthodox (and heavily Chasidic) neighborhood of Boro Park. Chasidic Jews are not noted for their interest in ancient history or in archaeology. In fact, Chasidim are usually mentioned in connection with archaeology only when they are protesting the excavation of human remains at a dig

The BAR article caught the attention of Dr. Donald Brown, the last living member of James Starkey’s excavation of Lachish in the 1930s. Dr. Brown had been allowed to keep some finds that were considered “doubles.” Now an elderly man, Brown donated them to the museum. “He didn’t want to give the items to a big museum,” Rabbi Deutsch told BAR.

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Rabbi Deutsch drove more than eight hours from New York City to Brown’s home in Waterville, Maine, to collect the artifacts. “My knees were shaking when I saw the objects from Lachish,” Rabbi Deutsch told BAR.

The items Dr. Brown gave Rabbi Deutsch for the museum included Israelite pottery, a pair of bronze anklets, a LMLK jar handle with the name of the city of Sokoh inscribed on it, a Cypriot pot cover, oil lamps, wine stoppers and arrowheads from the conquest of Lachish in 701 B.C. Lachish was conquered by the Assyrian king Sennacherib on his way to an unsuccessful siege of Jerusalem. Many of the Lachish objects still had the excavation’s registration numbers on them. Rabbi Deutsch added that Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay, who was a staff member of Tel Aviv University’s renewed excavations at the site in the 1970s, came to visit the museum so he could see the newly acquired items.

96-year-old Brown is also the last living excavator who was in Egypt when King Tut’s tomb was discovered in 1926. He was working nearby in the Valley of the Queens for Herbert Winlock, director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, helping to excavate the tomb of Ramesses II’s second wife, Meryt Amun. Because the team at Tut’s tomb was understaffed, Winlock sent Brown to work there for six weeks. Brown was allowed to keep some items considered “doubles” from Meryt Amun’s tomb, and he donated those items as well to Rabbi Deutsch’s museum. They include an alabaster cosmetic dish with the queen’s name on it, jewelry and cosmetic items. They were all examined by Dr. Peter Lacovara, senior curator of the Egyptian section of the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, during his visit to the Living Torah Museum.

Also on display at the museum are items on loan from another BAR reader, Harvey A. Herbert, an attorney from Brooklyn, New York. Mr. Herbert owns one of only five bullae with the name of King Hezekiah of Judah (a bulla is a lump of clay impressed by a seal while still soft and then affixed to a document). He also owns the only complete four-handled LMLK (meaning “belonging to the king”) jar in the world. Herbert has allowed the museum to exhibit his entire collection of First Temple period inscriptions, which includes seals, bullae, inscribed weights and the complete four-handled LMLK jar. The Hezekiah bulla and 18 other bullae in Herbert’s collection were authenticated by Professor Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University, who has recently identified a number of artifacts in Israel as forgeries, including the James ossuary inscription and the inscribed ivory pomegranate.

“I feel indebted to BAR for being the reason these amazing artifacts are now in the museum,” Rabbi Deutsch wrote to us recently. “You saved the Lachish artifacts from being lost forever.”—S.F.

Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, founder and director of the Living Torah Museum in Brooklyn, New York, credits a BAR articlea with leading