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Ancient Israel in Japan

For readers of Japanese, BAS’s Ancient Israel—A Short History from Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple has now been published in that language. The authors include (P. Kyle McCarter), (Nahum M. Sarna), (Joseph A. Callaway), (André Lemaire), (Siegfried H. Horn), (James D. Purvis), (Lee I. A. Levine) and (Shaye J. D. Cohen). The volume is edited by (Hershel Shanks).

The Japanese edition makes a wonderful gift, regardless of the languages the recipient reads—or for yourself to place on your bookshelf or coffee table. The color dust jacket and color plates, as well as many black-and-white pictures, can be appreciated even by the illiterate. To order your copy, call 011-81-3-3288-2200.

Readers of Hebrew may note that Japanese books, like Hebrew books, read “back to front.” However, the Japanese text reads vertically, in columns rather than rows, and from left to right.

A Polish edition of Ancient Israel will appear shortly. For those who read neither Japanese nor Polish, the English-language edition is still available (call 1-800-221-4644).

How to Settle Things—File a Lawsuit

Qimron Disease Spreads in Israeli Academia

The way to settle academic differences these days is to file a lawsuit, or so it seems. The Qimron Disease^a is proving infectious in Israel. Dr. Dan Urman, like Qimron a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, filed a lawsuit because in two recent publications he was not given credit for his archaeological work.

In 1970 and 1971, as Israeli army staff officer in charge of archaeological affairs in the Golan Heights, Urman directed two seasons of excavations at a site known as Kursi on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, where the Miracle of the Swine (Mark 5:1–20; Luke 8:26–39; Matthew 8:28–34) is said to have occurred and where a beautiful Byzantine church was discovered.^b Later in 1971 a systematic excavation was undertaken under the direction of Urman and archaeologist Vassilios Tzaferis. In subsequent seasons the dig was directed by Tzaferis, Urman having left his army position. Tzaferis alone wrote the final report on the excavation, which did not include the work of the first two seasons.

Recently Tzaferis wrote the article on Kursi in The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land,^c in which he stated that the four seasons of excavation of the site between 1970 and 1974 had been directed by him, without mentioning Urman. Though Tzaferis listed Urman’s account of the excavation in Christian News From Israel, he failed to cite Urman’s reports published in the Antiquities Department’s annual publication of its excavations or a joint article he and Urman published in the Hebrew journal Qadmoniot.

Tzaferis also contributed a chapter on Kursi to the recently published volume entitled Ancient Churches Revealed, edited by Yoram Tsafrir. The chapter is adapted from the article he and Urman wrote in Qadmoniot, but Urman is not listed as co-author, nor is he cited.

Urman contacted Tsafrir last summer regarding the ommissions. After not hearing from him for a month, Urman filed a lawsuit seeking to block distribution of the books and damages of 200,000 shekels (about $70,000) against Tzaferis; Professor Ephraim Stern, who edited the encyclopedia; Tsafrir; the Israel Exploration Society, publisher of the encyclopedia and of both the Hebrew and English editions of Ancient Churches Revealed; Carta and Defense Ministry Publications, co-publishers of the Hebrew edition of the encyclopedia; and Simon and Schuster, distributor of the English edition. Tsafrir told BAR that, after hearing from Urman, he wrote to the various parties involved and could have resolved the dispute had he been given some time.

Tzaferis told BAR, in his own defense, that Urman had left for the United States in 1974 and basically told him that Kursi was his (Tzaferis’s) to publish. The scientific publication of the site appeared in Atiqot, volume 16, 016written by Tzaferis, with “the co-operation of Danny Urman.” So Urman received credit “even though he didn’t write a word of it,” Tzaferis said.

As for the question of how Urman’s name came to be omitted from the Kursi article in Ancient Churches Revealed, Tzaferis said that Urman’s name was mistakenly dropped in the process of translating the Hebrew Qadmoniot article for the English Ancient Churches Revealed (whose mistake it was Tzaferis could not say).

Tzaferis claims that he has written all the significant articles on Kursi and that the only publication that matters—the scientific publication in Atiqot—gives Urman whatever credit he may deserve. All the later publications Tzaferis characterizes as popular works that do not require a detailed list of who excavated when.

The defendants, threatened with the costs of a lawsuit, quickly settled. The Israel Exploration Society apologized for its errors and has published the following correction in the Israel Exploration Journal (volume 43, number 4) and in Qadmoniot (volume 26, numbers 3–4): “The Israel Exploration Society regrets that Dr. Dan Urman’s name was omitted from the entry on Kursi in the Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land and in Ancient Churches Revealed. Dr. Urman participated in the excavations of Kursi in 1970 and 1971, and published a number of articles on the site, as specified in the bibliography of the EAEHL. This omission will be corrected in future editions.”

It appears that justice has been done, but we wonder if resort to the courts was necessary to achieve this result. What is happening to the fragile fabric of academic collegiality?

Bronze Age Source of Tin Found in Turkey?

The sweat and blood of children may have helped to forge the Bronze Age, if recent discoveries prove correct. Aslihan Yener, assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, believes that a mine and ancient mining village she has found in the Central Taurus mountains of Turkey show that tin mining was a well-developed industry in the area as early as 2870 B.C.

Tin is the metal that made possible the Bronze Age (3000–1200 B.C.), because, when added in small amounts to copper, it produces bronze, which is harder and more easily cast in molds than copper. This technological advance helped to spur the great economic expansion that occurred thoughout the Near East at that time. Until now, however, scholars have thought that the nearest source of tin was in Afghanistan.^d Yener’s discovery therefore may change established theories about economic and metallurgical developments in the Bronze Age Mediterranean world.

The mine, at a site called Kestel—some 60 miles north of Tarsus, on the Mediterranean 017coast—has two miles of tunnels, some about two feet wide. The narrow width and the discovery of skeletons of some 12- to 15-year-olds buried inside the mine suggest that children served as the miners. Nearby stand the ruins of the mining village of Goltepe, which was probably occupied by 500 to 1,000 persons more or less continuously between 3290 and 1840 B.C. At the village site, Yener found 50,000 stone tools used to dig and crush the ore and ceramic vessels that served as crucibles. The site contains no evidence of copper metallurgy, however, so it was not an alloying industry, that is, it did not produce bronze; instead it produced tin for export. According to Yener, it had become “a fully developed industry with specialization of work. It had gone beyond the craft-stages that characterize production done for local purposes only.”

BAR Editorial Advisory Board member Professor James D. Muhly, of the University of Pennsylvania, called Yener’s claims “a very interesting hypothesis” and said she “is to be congratulated for her work at Kestel and Goltepe” because she “has pointed the way toward what must be done in the future” at other sites. But Muhly insists that “we do not know what they were doing at Kestel and Goltepe during the third millennium B.C.” and that Yener’s statements “cannot be supported by the available evidence.” For example, no tin ingots nor any artifacts of tin have been found to support the claimed discovery of a “mold to make tin ingots.” Muhly points out that the refining process necessary to get tin out of the ore from Kestel would have taken “hundreds of thousands of hours of very labor-intensive work” and asks, “Why would anyone have bothered when much more accessible sources of tin were available?”

Those more accessible sources include a site in the eastern desert of Egypt, which may or may not have been exploited at that time, and tin mines in Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The written record bolsters the claims of the latter four locations. “All of our cuneiform sources for a Bronze Age trade in tin indicate a source for that tin located east of Mesopotamia,” Muhly notes. “No textual evidence for Bronze Age tin points to an Anatolian source.”

The lack of textual evidence notwithstanding, the new evidence from Turkey must be addressed on its own merits, Yener argues. She and her colleagues have analyzed tin-rich slag from 50 crucibles discovered at Goltepe. Within the total one metric ton of metallurgical debris in the form of crucible and vitrified materials, she has excavated some that have 30-percent tin content (a high percentage) and some with tin metal (the product) still intact in the crucible. Yener discounts the significance of the lack of tin ingots or tin artifacts, which she says “are rarely found in any excavations.” In response to the suggestion that the Kestel miners may have been mining gold or silver, she says that no gold or silver has been found at the site or in the crucibles. Countering the argument that the mining and refining process at Kestel was too laborious, Yener suggests that tin was very valuable in the earliest centuries of the Bronze Age, thus making the effort worthwhile, and that the “more accessible” tin from eastern sources may have entered the Near East later and, because of its cheapness, superseded the tin from local sources such as Kestel. She notes that the cuneiform sources come from a later time, as they refer to a Middle Bronze Age (2200–1550 B.C.) tin trade.

Yener is now pursuing research that may lead to a resolution of the debate. She hopes to connect bronze artifacts to ore sources in the central Taurus mountains by matching the ratios of their lead isotopes.

Wall Paintings Restored at Mareshah

A parade of exotic and mythical beasts can now be seen in Beth Guvrin National Park, near Lachish, about 23 miles southwest of Jerusalem. Griffins, leopards, lions, giraffes, hippopotami, rhinoceri, alligators, tapirs and fish with elephant and rhinoceros faces march across the walls of one of the recently restored Hellenistic burial caves in the Mareshah part of the park. Drawings published in 1905 guided the Israel Antiquities Authority’s restoration of the badly defaced and faded cave paintings, which show the influence of Semitic, Ptolemaic, Persian, Assyrian and Egyptian imagery.

Discovered at the turn of the century, the cave paintings decorate the first of the seven tombs whose wall paintings and more than 30 inscriptions, including a love poem, date to the Seleucid period (196–119 B.C.). Of particular note are the names inscribed in these tombs. The fathers’ names are generally Semitic, but the sons’ names are Greek, suggesting assimilation of this colony from Sidon into the Hellenized local population. The other burial caves resemble Ptolemaic ones found at Alexandria and Hellenistic Phoenician caves.

A Bad Lot

You would think things could not get worse for Lot’s wife. After failing to obey her husband’s warning—and God’s order—not to look back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, she was turned into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19). You can still see her today, tradition says, standing as part of the Sodom mountain range on the western end of the Great Rift Valley and overlooking the Dead Sea basin. But perhaps standing is not the right word to describe her anymore. Heavy rains and a recent series of earthquakes in her area have caused her to crumble and tilt 15 degrees to the east, a development that has scientists predicting her downfall. According to the January 1 Jerusalem Post, keeping Lot’s Wife upright seems impossible, unless an earth movement moves her back, since she is “not only very old [about 20,000 years], but very heavy, weighing several thousand tons.” It looks like she may soon be just another fallen woman.

Ancient Israel in Japan