Inside BAR
On the eighth day of the Hebrew month of Elul (August 18, 1983), the Israeli authorities opened to the public a building that had been closed for 1,913 years to the day. The building, in ancient Jerusalem’s Upper City, was a workshop that was stormed by Roman soldiers on the eighth of Elul, 70 A.D., the year the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and burned the Jewish Temple. Now,.after ten years of digging in the Upper City, the eminent Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad, who directed the excavations that uncovered the workshop, has published his dramatic and often heart-rending finds of the human and material toll the Romans took on that day.Discovering Jerusalem: Recent Archaeological Excavations in the Upper City (Thomas Nelson, 1983), reviewed by Philip J. King, illuminates the life of the city, its people, shops and residences at the time of the Roman destruction and also spans the city’s settlement from its earliest occupation in the eighth century B.C. through the Crusader period. Most of the material is based on his own excavations (see Books in Brief).
In this issue, archaeologist Avigad has provided BAR readers with two engrossing adaptations from Discovering Jerusalem: “Jerusalem in Flames—The Burnt House Captures a Moment in Time” is about one of the buildings the Romans put to the torch; “Jerusalem Flourishing—A Craft Center for Stone, Pottery and Glass” describes the sophisticated and innovative but little-known industries that flourished in first-century Jerusalem.
Avigad grew up in Austria and Czechoslovakia. In 1925, he immigrated to Israel where he attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ultimately joining its faculty in 1949. He holds degrees in archaeology, architecture and philosophy. After serving as chief assistant to E. L. Sukenik (Yigael Yadin’s father) at the Beth Alpha excavations, Avigad went on to participate in and lead important excavations around the country, including the Judean Desert caves, Beth She’arim and Masada.
In our November/December 1982 issue, James F. Strange and BAR editor Hershel Shanks reported on an exciting discovery in Galilee. Under an octagon-shaped building in Capernaum near that city’s famous synagogue, St. Peter’s house was discovered. (See “Has the House Where Jesus Stayed in Capernaum Been Found?” BAR 08:06.) Now Strange and Shanks add another chapter to the Capernaum story. In “The Synagogue Where Jesus Preached Found at Capernaum” they focus on the building recently discovered directly beneath the beautiful white limestone synagogue so familiar to Capernaum visitors. The lower building is, they suggest, the first-century synagogue in which Jesus preached and taught.
Strange is Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of South Florida and Professor in the university’s Department of Religious Studies. He has served as associate director of the Meiron Excavation Project in the Upper Galilee for 11 seasons and in 1980 spent an additional six months in Israel researching archaeological remains relating to Jewish Christianity in Jerusalem and in Capernaum. This past summer, Strange directed a new dig at Sepphoris, capital of the Lower Galilee from the first to the fifth century A.D. A solo singer in Tampa churches, Strange is also a popular lecturer at colleges, synagogues and churches.
Any serious student of the Bible or Biblical archaeology either owns or has shopped for a Biblical atlas. But choosing among the scores of maps, geographies and atlases available today is no simple task. In “Putting the Bible on the Map,” James Fleming helps BAR readers make choices—whether of a first atlas or an additional, up-to-date atlas. Fleming traces the history of Biblical maps and explains why an understanding of the land of the Bible is so important to understanding the people and events that make up its drama. He also reviews 19 of the major geographies and atlases currently available.
Fleming brings an unusual combination of skills to bear on his survey of Biblical atlases. While he was a graduate student at the American Institute of Holyland Studies in Jerusalem, a class assignment led him to make a relief map of Israel’s ancient road systems. The interest this assignment sparked led him to write a doctoral thesis on teaching Biblical historical geography. He then produced and marketed a series of relief maps of Biblical lands which he himself created. His unique visual aids, his expertise in Biblical history and geography, and his effectiveness as a lecturer have given Fleming a reputation as a teacher’s teacher—at Hebrew University, at the Jerusalem Center for Biblical Studies, where he is Educational Director, and as leader of BAR’s six-week Summer Seminar in Israel.
Tell Mardikh in northern Syria is the site of one of the most spectacular epigraphic finds of our time—the royal library of the third-millennium B.C. kingdom of Ebla. Over 10,000 cuneiform tablets excavated since 1974 have opened up a new world of study to scholars. But the excavations at Ebla and the interpretation of the tablets, especially as they relate to the Bible, have been continually torn by politics. “ … everything that takes place [at Ebla] is in some way connected with politics,” says archaeologist James D. Muhly. In “Ur and Jerusalem Not Mentioned in Ebla Tablets, Say Ebla Expedition Scholars,” Muhly reports on the United States tour this past summer of Paolo Matthiae and Alfonso Archi, the chief archaeologist and the official epigrapher of the Italian Mission to Ebla. According to these scholars, the Ebla texts focus on pre-Biblical Inner Syria.
Professor of Ancient Near East History and Chairman of the Ancient History Program at the University of Pennsylvania, Muhly directs excavations at Tel Michal and Tel Gerisa on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. He last informed BAR readers of Ebla research in a review of Ebla books by Matthiae and by Giovanni Pettinato (the Italian Mission’s first epigrapher) in the November/December 1981 issue (see Books in Brief, BAR 07:06). More recently, in a BAR cover story entitled “How Iron Technology Changed the Ancient World—And Gave the Philistines a Military Edge,” BAR 08:06, Muhly shared with our readers some fascinating insights into ancient metallurgy and how these insights enable us to interpret Biblical events. Muhly’s Coming of the Age of Iron, co-edited with T. A. Wertime, has already sold out in its first printing and is being reprinted by Yale University Press.
In addition to Philip King’s review of Nahman Avigad’s Discovering Jerusalem, Books in Brief includes a dazzling volume of illustrations of the Holy Land. Professor of Biblical Studies at Boston College, Philip King is the immediate past president of the Catholic Biblical Association and from 1976 to 1983 served as president of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). His official history of ASOR, American Archaeology in the Mideast, A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research, was published this year.
The Holy Land, a new collection of romantic landscapes by 19th-century artist David Roberts, is reviewed by Neil Asher Silberman (see Books in Brief). This large volume contains reproductions of 123 of Roberts’s lithographs along with the text of his personal travel journal. Silberman is known to BAR readers as the author of “In Search of Solomon’s Lost Treasures,” BAR 06:04, an article adapted from his book, Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archaeology and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799–1917, which was reviewed in our July/August 1982 issue (see Books in Brief, BAR 08:04).
The BAR office received more than 80 entries for the Biblical Archaeology Essay Contest by the September 1 deadline. However, putting a cloud over this very good news was a resignation letter received in August from one of the contest judges, R. Thomas Schaub of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In “Schaub Resigns As Essay Judge,” we publish both Schaub’s letter stating his reason for resigning and the response to Schaub by editor Hershel Shanks.