Inside BAR

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The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long strip of linen bearing the faint image of a crucified man. Many believe it originally covered the body of Jesus after he was taken from the cross. In “The Shroud of Turin—Probably the Work of a 14th-Century Artist or Forger,” Robert A. Wild, a Jesuit priest, examines the evidence presented in the most recent studies, adding his own perspective as a Biblical historian, and delivers a negative verdict. Some people who begin as skeptics concerning the Shroud end as believers in its authenticity, but Wild says his research left him “more doubtful than ever that the Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.”

Wild is Associate Professor of New Testament and Christian origins at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He reviewed The Bones of St. Peter by John E. Walsh in Books in Brief, BAR 09:01. Wild is spending this year in Rome investigating Jewish catacombs and other Greco-Roman antiquities related to his special interests.

During the Judean monarchy, Lachish was the second most important city in the kingdom. Only Jerusalem surpassed it. Lachish figures prominently in the Biblical account of the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land, in the revolt against King Amaziah of Judah, in the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s campaign against Judah and in the Babylonian conquest of Judah. This issue of BAR features three articles on Lachish. The first, “Destruction of Judean Fortress Portrayed in Dramatic Eighth-Century B.C. Pictures,” brings together the Biblical evidence for Sennacherib’s conquest of the city and correlates it with the archaeological evidence, the evidence from cuneiform tablets and the evidence of the pictures of the battle recovered from Sennacherib’s palace—all as described in a dazzling new book by David Ussishkin, the excavator of Lachish.

In News from the Field, excavator Ussishkin describes his discovery, just last summer, of a counter-ramp thrown up by the Judeans at Lachish to buttress their city wall against an attack launched by the Assyrians from Sennacherib’s siege ramp outside the City. “Defensive Judean Counter-Ramp Found at Lachish in 1983 Season” sheds new light on the fierce defense the Judeans mounted against Sennacherib in 701 B.C.

Formerly director of Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology, Ussishkin is editor of the Institute’s journal, Tel Aviv, and is also a member of BAR’s Editorial Advisory Board. He has directed the excavations at Lachish since 1973.

Scholars’ Corner takes us from the Assyrian conquest of Lachish in 701 B.C. to the eve of the city’s destruction by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians about 588 B.C. In “Yadin Presents New Interpretation of the Famous Lachish Letters,” Oded Borowski explains Yigael Yadin’s new theories about this ancient Hebrew correspondence, which was found in the destruction debris of Lachish’s city gate. Sure to stir up controversy among scholars, Yadin’s new theories were recently published by the Biblical Archaeology Society in Recent Archaeology in the Land of Israel, a collection of 19 exciting chapters, each written by an outstanding archaeologist working in Israel today (see review in Books in Brief).

A member of BAR’s Editorial Advisory Board, Borowski is director of the Semitic languages division in the department of Modern Languages and Classics at Emory University in Atlanta. His frequent and popular contributions to BAR include “Five Ways to Defend an Ancient City,” BAR 09:02, “Sherds, Sherds, Sherds,” BAR 08:04, and “How to Tell a Tell,” BAR 07:02.

The Philistines are an ancient people whose activities in Canaan beginning in the 13th century B.C. are well-known to us from the Bible. They are one of a group of ethnically related people known as the Sea Peoples. Although scores of excavations in Greece, Cyprus and Israel over the last decades have produced a cornucopia of information about many ancient peoples, the question of where and how the Sea Peoples emerged has remained a scholarly crux. In “Exploring Philistine Origins on the Island of Cyprus,” Vassos Karageorghis, who has excavated several 13th century B.C. sites on his native Cyprus, provides archaeological evidence for the process by which the Sea Peoples emerged during the turmoil at the end of the Late Bronze Age.

Karageorghis was born in Trikomo, Cyprus, and received his university education at the University of London. He has been Director 005of the Cyprus Department of Antiquities since 1963 and has excavated at numerous sites on Cyprus, including Salamis, Kition, Maa-Palaeokastro and Pyla-Kokkinokremos. Karageorghis has written more than 20 books on Cypriot archaeology and art and has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and at the State University of New York at Albany.

This issue also includes a special section celebrating BAR’s tenth year of publication. In “BAR Becomes Ten,” editor Hershel Shanks reviews our first decade, going from bedrock level to a view of future strata. As part of our celebration, we announce the winner of BAR’s Biblical Archaeology Essay Contest and at the same time announce a new Biblical Archaeology Essay Contest, this time open to undergraduates. We also identify BAR’s 100,000th subscriber.

BARlines brings news of emergency preservation work on the Solomonic Gate at Tel Gezer planned for this summer, of a new popular book on Gezer to be written by its excavator, William Dever, and Hershel Shanks’s review of the annual meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research, including the conclusion of the debate on Biblical archaeology.

In the 1950s, British television screened a new guessing game show, starring archaeologists, called “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?” Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who excavated numerous sites from Wales to Pakistan, was one of the panelists and for a time became the most famous archaeologist in the world. In a review of Adventurer in Archaeology: The Biography of Sir Mortimer Wheeler, by Jacquetta Hawkes, Neil Asher Silberman examines the extraordinary career and flamboyant personality of the man whose stratigraphic techniques were used so extensively by Kathleen Kenyon that they became known as the Wheeler-Kenyon method.

Silberman is a professional writer and a trained archaeologist who excavated at Tell Akko from 1973 to 1976. In the November/December BAR he reviewed The Holy Land and Yesterday the Holy Land, two books of lithographs by the famous 19th-century artist, David Roberts (Books in Brief, BAR 09:06). He and co-authors Trude and Moshe Dothan will publish Search for the Philistines this spring. Explaining his professional focus on popular archaeology books, Silberman protests that “scholars have ignored the general public for too long; it’s time that archaeology was made available in clear, non-technical language. Besides, I believe that the modern exploration of human history is as interesting and relevant as any space probe, star war, or raid on a lost ark.”

The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long strip of linen bearing the faint image of a crucified man. Many believe it originally covered the body of Jesus after he was taken from the cross. In “The Shroud of Turin—Probably the Work of a 14th-Century Artist or Forger,” Robert A. Wild, a Jesuit priest, examines the evidence presented in the most recent studies, adding his own perspective as a Biblical historian, and delivers a negative verdict. Some people who begin as skeptics concerning the Shroud end as believers in its authenticity, but Wild says his research left him “more doubtful […]