Inside BAR

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A remarkable phenomenon swept Christianity soon after it triumphed as the official religion of the Roman empire: Devout adherents by the thousands, rather than staying at home to enjoy the faith’s comfortable new status, moved to the forbidding Judean desert to live austere lives as monks. Motivated in good part by the personal sacrifice of martyrs of previous generations, these newcomers to the Holy Land transformed the wilderness near Jerusalem into a hub of well-organized monastic communities. In recent years, young Israeli scholars have thoroughly revised our understanding of these communities and of the people who lived in them. Yizhar Hirschfeld, a prominent member of that group of scholars, describes several significant monasteries and how they embody “Spirituality in the Desert.”

Hirschfeld is lecturer of classical archaeology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. A Jerusalem native, he received his Ph.D. in archaeology in 1987 from the Hebrew University, where he completed his dissertation on the Judean desert monasteries in the Byzantine period. Among his major excavations are the Roman baths of Hammat Gader, farmsteads at Ramat Hanadiv near Caesarea, several monasteries in the Judean desert, and ancient Tiberias. He is about to begin excavation of Roman-Byzantine Ein Gedi. He is author of The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (Yale Univ. Press, 1992); and The Palestinian Dwelling in the Roman-Byzantine Period (Franciscan Press and Israel Exploration Society, 1995).

In a companion piece to Hirschfeld’s general survey article, Yitzhak Magen examines one large monastery in detail. The sumptuous mosaics, elegant architecture and elaborate water system of Martyrius, built on the edge of the Judean desert, testify to the luxuriant life of a Byzantine monastery. Located on an ancient pilgrimage route between Jerusalem and Jericho, Martyrius attracted thousands of early Christians, who stopped to rest at its hospice when visiting Biblical sites in the region. In a gorgeous setting, reclusive monks and hordes of visitors comfortably coexisted, writes Magen in “Martyrius—Lavish Living for Monks.”

Magen, who directed the excavation of Martyrius from 1981 to 1984, is officer in charge of archaeology at the Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem. As Israel’s chief archaeologist for the West Bank, he has also directed excavations at Mount Gerizim (see BARlines, in this issue).

Not many Biblical archaeologists dig in Spain: The country isn’t mentioned once in BAR’s 20-year index. But the next edition will include at least one entry under that heading. The reliefs on a massive stone monument unearthed by a farmer in Pozo Moro, Spain, reflect a belief in resurrection that swept across the Mediterranean world—from Israel to Spain—in the first millennium B.C.E., writes Aharon Kempinski in “From Death to Resurrection—The Early Evidence.” Under Phoenician influence, Kempinski observes, this new belief simultaneously manifested itself in the Pozo Moro monument and in the earliest Biblical reference to resurrection, Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of the dry bones.

A senior archaeologist with Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology, Kempinski died in July 1994 shortly after we received his approval for our editing of this article. At his death, Kempinski was director of excavations at Tel Kabri, near the Sea of Galilee. He served on BAR’s editorial advisory board from 1975 to 1991 and contributed numerous articles to the magazine, including “Jacob in History,” BAR 14:01, and “Hittites in the Bible—What Does Archaeology Say?” BAR 05:05.

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Is American Biblical archaeology facing extinction? Does the Bible’s past have a future here, in a country that nurtured and encouraged the most luminous figures in Bronze and Iron Age archaeology—William F. Albright, Cyrus H. Gordon, Nelson Glueck, James B. Pritchard? In “The Death of a Discipline,” William G. Dever tells a cautionary tale. Biblical archaeology may be thriving in Israel, but Dever warns that Americans are increasingly being reduced to spectators. No major new American-run digs are getting underway, and the big ongoing excavations at Ashkelon, Tel Miqne and Sepphoris are nearing completion. In addition, universities are trimming archaeology departments and thinning out graduate programs, and many professors of Middle Eastern archaeology, like Dever himself, will not be replaced. So where will the next generation of scholars come from? If something is not done soon, Dever warns, American Biblical archaeology will be a thing of the past.

Dever, a professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona, was director of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem from 1971 to 1975. He also directed excavations at Gezer from 1966 to 1971 and again in 1984. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly publications, Dever is author of Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research (Univ. of Washington Press, 1990).

A remarkable phenomenon swept Christianity soon after it triumphed as the official religion of the Roman empire: Devout adherents by the thousands, rather than staying at home to enjoy the faith’s comfortable new status, moved to the forbidding Judean desert to live austere lives as monks. Motivated in good part by the personal sacrifice of martyrs of previous generations, these newcomers to the Holy Land transformed the wilderness near Jerusalem into a hub of well-organized monastic communities. In recent years, young Israeli scholars have thoroughly revised our understanding of these communities and of the people who lived in them. […]