First Person: Cites Unseen

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I have a bone to pick with my scholar friends. They resist citing articles in BAR whenever they can.

My favorite example involves the remarkable finds at a site in the northern Sinai desert called Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, excavated by Ze’ev Meshel of Tel Aviv University in 1975–1976. The hoard of pottery and stone vessels from the second half of the ninth century B.C.E. to the early eighth century B.C.E. bears extraordinary drawings and inscriptions in Hebrew and Phoenician. The inscriptions mention the deities El and Baal. But the most startling inscription speaks of Yahweh (the personal name of the Hebrew God) and his Asherah. Some have even suggested that the accompanying drawing on the pottery depicts the consort of the Israelite God!

In 1978 the Israel Museum in Jerusalem featured the finds in an exhibit for which Meshel wrote a small catalog entitled Kuntillet ‘Ajrud: A Religious Centre from the Time of the Judaean Monarchy on the Border of Sinai. In our March/April 1979 issue, he wrote a cover story for us called “Did Yahweh Have a Consort? The New Religious Inscriptions from Sinai,” which was dramatically illustrated with large, full-color pictures. These are still the only basic publications of the finds because Meshel’s final report remains to be published. The BAR article, however, is rarely cited in the scholarly literature. Only the Israel Museum catalog is cited, even though copies are rarer than hen’s teeth. Many fine libraries do not have it in their collection.

This is true as recently as 2001 in the prize-winning book Life in Biblical Israel, by Philip King and Lawrence Stager. Even though Kuntillet ‘Ajrud is treated in its own section of the book, only the museum catalog is cited (in spite of the fact that King and Stager note that they are unable to give a page citation to the catalog because the pages are unnumbered).

I suppose the explanation for this oddity would be that BAR is not a scholarly publication. Yet most of BAR’s authors are scholars. And it is widely accessible (indeed, now available on a CD that contains every issue of BAR through 2003). Doesn’t that count for something?

And the fact is that articles in BAR are cited when there is no alternative. Many of the important discussions in BAR can be found only here. For that reason, BAR articles are regularly mentioned in scholarly, as well as popular, books, including King and Stager’s. BAR is also listed as one of the abbreviations in these books—right along with IEJ (Israel Exploration Journal), BASOR (Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research) and PEQ (Palestine Exploration Quarterly).

The Israel Exploration Journal, incidentally, does not list us in its abbreviations of journals, although many scholarly publications do. Instead, when we are cited in the Israel Exploration Journal, as we often are, our full name is spelled out, as if we were some obscure reference whose acronym would not be recognized by IEJ’s scholarly readers.

After 30 years, isn’t it time to get over it?

I have a bone to pick with my scholar friends. They resist citing articles in BAR whenever they can.