First Person: My Final “First Person”

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In the next issue of BAR, I will have a new title: Editor Emeritus. Yes, after 42 years I will be retiring. I will still be around—putting in my two cents. But I will not have the responsibility for making sure it is all there and putting it all together.

That will be the job of the new editor, Robert (Bob) Cargill. He is young, and he is smart. In some ways, under his editorship BAR will be the same magazine; in other ways, it may be new and different. I am confident you will continue to be enthralled with the magazine, and I think you will like Bob.

Bob Cargill is Assistant Professor of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. His research includes the study of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, literary criticism of the Bible and the Pseudepigrapha, and the ancient Near East. He’s an experienced archaeologist and has excavated at Banias, Omrit, Hazor and Tel Azekah in modern Israel. You may recognize his face, as Bob frequently appears on TV—including the History Channel’s Bible Secrets Revealed and CNN’s Finding Jesus. His most recent book is The Cities That Built the Bible (HarperOne, 2016).

I have no particular plans. I have a few very intriguing articles in the cooker. I will continue working on them until, I trust, they appear in BAR. In other ways, I will continue working with our publisher (and president), Sue Laden, to make sure we are able to pay our printer. Meeting the bills has often been difficult. Many of our readers help us with donations in addition to their subscriptions. And a few wonderful donors help us in a major way.

Of course, I have a little nostalgia. I could fill this issue of BAR with that, but I will confine myself to a few incidents. The first is a negative: I never had a course in the Bible or archaeology and knew nothing about publishing a magazine. I had a degree in English literature from Haverford College, a master’s degree in sociology from Columbia University and a law degree from Harvard Law School.

I went to Israel with my wife and two little girls (then ages six and three) in 1972 on a sabbatical from my law practice. As is often the case, I was helped by some extraordinary good luck: On a family outing to Hazor, my six-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, picked up from the ground part of a clay pottery handle incised with a Syro-Hittite deity. After some initial resistance, Elizabeth agreed to give the handle to the leader of the archaeological expedition to Hazor, a military hero in the war that saw the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and also Israel’s most famous archaeologist, Yigael Yadin. As a result, I met Yadin, and we had some good talks.

At one point, I offered to help Yadin prepare the publication of the pottery handle for the Israel Exploration Journal. “No,” Yadin immediately replied, “I’ll help you.” And so it was. The article appeared in the Israel Exploration Journal under my name. (I hasten to add, the actual research and writing was also mine.)

Of course there were many other things and people that helped launch BAR—some accidental, others purposeful—like the American archaeologist Bill Dever, then head of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. His judgment was just what I needed to be editor of this new magazine (which was still many months away and not yet even conceived of).

In the beginning, BAR came out only four times a year and had no color pictures. It has changed many times in many ways.

Over the years, I have met and worked with many Israeli and other Middle Eastern archaeologists—and they are a wonderful bunch. I thought I would end this final First Person column with a complaint, however. I would complain about Israel’s failure to treat female archaeologists equally with men. Well, I’m sure it’s happened—and is to be condemned—but long ago a number of leading archaeologists in the field were women. I think particularly of my friend Trude Dothan, then the world’s leading scholar on the Philistines. She died not long ago at age 93.

Instead, let me end with a plea to give your support to our new editor, Bob Cargill. He’s got a heavy job; it will keep him busy. But I’m confident he is more than up to it. And I’ll be around, I trust for a long time.

In the next issue of BAR, I will have a new title: Editor Emeritus. Yes, after 42 years I will be retiring. I will still be around—putting in my two cents. But I will not have the responsibility for making sure it is all there and putting it all together.