Inside BAR

004

“Every tablet, every little scarab, is a portion of life solidified … When we look closely into the work we seem almost to watch the hand that did it; this stone is a day, a week of the life of some living man. I know his mind, his feeling, by what he has thought and done on this stone. I live with him in looking into his work, and admiring and valuing it.”

Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie (1835–1942)

Some archaeologists are motivated by just such thoughts; others are driven by insatiable curiosity about the past. Joseph Callaway, author of “Sir Flinders Petrie: Father of Palestinian Archaeology,” had a different point of view: He aspired to “armchair archaeology.” However, Callaway says, he “soon learned that the action is in the field.” Now after 15 seasons of archaeological field expeditions, the last ten of which were spent as director of the Ai excavations, Professor Callaway believes he took the right course of action.

Before he became a field archaeologist, Professor Callaway taught Biblical archaeology and Old Testament at his alma mater, Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. After post-graduate study at the London Institute of Archaeology, he was a field supervisor in 1961 and 1962 at the Jerusalem excavations directed by Kathleen Kenyon and at the Shechem Expeditions in 1960, 1962 and 1964, directed by G. Ernest Wright. Professor Callaway has been on the faculty of Southern Baptist Seminary since 1958. He has published numerous articles about Ai, Biblical archaeology and the Early Bronze age in Canaan. Now that he and his wife, Sara, are not traveling to the Middle East every summer, they have a “next best” place of retreat and recreation at a lake just inland from the ocean in Florida.

Another BAR author, Mayer Gruber, deciphers secrets from the past by reading and interpreting the literature of the ancients. Professor Gruber, a specialist in Ancient Semitic Languages and Literatures received his Ph.D. in 1977 from Columbia University. Since 1972 he has been a faculty member at Spertus College of Judaica in Chicago where he has taught both Hebrew Scriptures and Rabbinic Literature in a consortium of colleges and universities in the Chicago area. Dr. Gruber’s broad interests inspired him to develop a course called “Women in Jewish Law” in which the students, many of them women with no previous background in rabbinics, learn to use the Babylonian Talmud as a primary source for women’s history.

Dr. Gruber’s reinterpretation of the Cain and Abel story, “Was Cain Angry or Depressed,” developed during the course of research for his forthcoming book, Aspects of Nonverbal Communication in the Ancient East (Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome, 1980). That book deals with the meaning of the postures, gestures and facial expressions mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and in the literatures of the ancient Canaanites and Mesopotamians.

Professor Gruber, his wife and three sons—David, Benjamin and Hillel—have recently moved to Beer-sheba where Professor Gruber will lecture in the Department of Bible and Ancient Near East at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

Ze’ev Herzog has also lived and worked in Beer-sheba—at the ancient Tel Beer-sheba some two miles from the modern city of the same name. For this issue of BAR, Dr. Herzog has written “Beer-sheba of the Patriarchs,” a summary of the excavations of the earliest settlements at Beer-sheba. Frederic Brandfon of the University of Michigan, who studied pottery from the older levels of the Beer-sheba excavation, collaborated with Herzog on the dating of the site’s strata.

Dr. Herzog has special qualifications and interests that he has brought to bear on the discussion of dating Beer-sheba strata since his special expertise is in the field of ancient architecture. He has excavated at Arad, Megiddo, Hazor, Beer-sheba and has been the archaeological field director for the past three seasons at Tel Michal near Tel Aviv.

A lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Herzog has published many articles and books on Beer-sheba and Arad, as well as on ancient architecture and archaeology. Currently he is researching the reconstruction of ancient sites and preparing for the summer 1981 excavations at Tel-Gerisa (Tell Jerisheh) for which he will be the archaeological field director.

Married to Hanna, an instructor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University and a Ph.D. candidate, the Herzogs have two sons, Chen (11) and Ben (6).

Professor Giovanni Pettinato of the University of Rome is already well-known to BAR readers as the original epigrapher of the Italian mission to Ebla. Dr. Alfonso Archi, also of the University of Rome, is the current chief epigrapher to the mission.

“Every tablet, every little scarab, is a portion of life solidified … When we look closely into the work we seem almost to watch the hand that did it; this stone is a day, a week of the life of some living man. I know his mind, his feeling, by what he has thought and done on this stone. I live with him in looking into his work, and admiring and valuing it.”