After Avraham Biran’s recent death at just short of 100 years, there was an outpouring of richly deserved praise. Not least of this was for his excavation of Tel Dan from 1966 to 1999—the longest running excavation in Israel—and the remarkable finds he uncovered there, including the famous inscription that mentions the dynasty of King David, a gate from the Patriarchal age and a horn from the altar on the bama (high place) where Jeroboam installed a golden calf as Israel’s god (1 Kings 12:28–30). There were many more exciting recoveries.
But BAR readers like to know things whole. And it is also true that Biran’s dig at Tel Dan has been criticized within the profession. In a recent issue of Tel Aviv, the journal of the Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology, archaeologist Eran Arie sought to review the stratigraphy of the Biblical periods at Tel Dan, in archaeology termed the Iron Age II (1000–586 B.C.E.).1 Eran begins his analysis this way:
Given that the Iron II remains were never fully published, I was faced with certain constraints in preparing this article: Only a very small amount of the excavated pottery has been published; the vessels that have been published came from selected loci and even then not all the vessels from those loci were included in the plates; diverse terminology was used in different preliminary publications to describe the same architectural features; the excavators did not observe an independent stratigraphy in each area but rather worked out a general stratigraphic scheme, though it is clear that the various parts of the site developed independent of each other; in most of the publications there was no attempt to distinguish between description of the finds and their interpretations; finally, my attempt to observe unpublished material from Dan has not met with success. Therefore, one should refer to the suggestions presented in this article as tentative and reevaluate them when the Iron II material from Tel Dan is fully published.
In other words, Eran was not permitted to look at the excavated material about which he was writing.
After Avraham Biran’s recent death at just short of 100 years, there was an outpouring of richly deserved praise. Not least of this was for his excavation of Tel Dan from 1966 to 1999—the longest running excavation in Israel—and the remarkable finds he uncovered there, including the famous inscription that mentions the dynasty of King David, a gate from the Patriarchal age and a horn from the altar on the bama (high place) where Jeroboam installed a golden calf as Israel’s god (1 Kings 12:28–30). There were many more exciting recoveries. But BAR readers like to know things whole. […]
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