Inside BAR

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Bare granite mountains and mile after mile of sand interrupted here and there by an acacia tree—until 1967, this was the image conjured by the word “Sinai.” But in that year, following the Six Day War, Israeli archaeologists started exploring Sinai. For the next 15 years—until Sinai was returned to Egypt as part of the Camp David peace accords—Israeli archaeologists conducted hundreds of surveys and excavations. The result: rediscoveries of sites long forgotten and surprising new discoveries of cultures as old as civilization itself. These excavations have now collectively filled in numerous blank spots in the archaeological map of Sinai. One of the most prominent Israeli archaeologists who explored Sinai during this brief time was Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, who takes a wide-angle view of what he and his colleagues accomplished, in “Fifteen Years in Sinai.” The empty spaces on the map of Sinai are now dotted with discoveries spanning thousands of years. Beit-Arieh describes artifacts from the fabled turquoise mines exploited by the Egyptian Pharaohs from the 27th to the 12th centuries B.C., including a new example of the world’s oldest alphabetic writing; he also tells us about large numbers of settlements and artifacts left by the Early Bronze people more than 5,000 years ago. His summary reports on dramatic discoveries from almost all other archaeological periods—except the period of the Exodus. Beit-Arieh has been excavating in the desert areas of Israel and Sinai since 1969, when he participated in his first dig, at the Biblical tel of Beer-Sheva with the late Yohanan Aharoni. Beit-Arieh directed the Ophir Expedition to Sinai from 1971 to 1982, and since 1979 has excavated at Tel Ira and Horvat Uza in the Negev.

Yam sûp is the Hebrew name for the sea which the Israelites crossed dry-shod and in which Pharaoh’s chariots were drowned. Reed Sea, not Red Sea, is the frequent modern translation of this term. But in “Red Sea or Reed Sea?” Bernard F. Batto claims that the term yam sûp, in its various appearances in the Bible, can never mean Reed Sea. He also explores new depths of meaning in the term Red Sea and in the way the ancients understood this body of water. Associate Professor of Old Testament at the University of Dallas in Texas, Batto’s academic interests range from the cultural roles of women in Mari to mythological patterns in the Bible. Batto and his wife Theresa often go camping with their five children: Rachel, Nathan, Amos, Jeremiah and Sarah.

In the March/April 1984 issue, we described and illustrated the machinery of siege warfare as it was fought at the Judean city of Lachish in the eighth century B.C. (“Destruction of Judean Fortress Portrayed in Dramatic Eighth-Century B.C. Pictures,” BAR 10:02). Finds like arrowheads, armor and slingstones discovered near the city wall vividly recalled the battle that culminated in the deportation of the defeated Israelites. A few links of chain found near the city wall were a puzzle, however. What were they used for? Archaeologist Yigael Yadin read the article and called on his vast knowledge of Biblical warfare to explain the use of the chain during the heat of battle. In “The Mystery of the Unexplained Chain,” Yadin shows us an Assyrian relief from a ninth century B.C. Nineveh palace that illustrates the special use for this chain in siege warfare.

Yadin has had an extraordinary career as a scholar, statesman and general. Formerly chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, he is also the author of many popular books on archaeology, including The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands and volumes on his landmark excavations, Hazor and Masada. Yadin most recently appeared in BAR in the January/February 1983 issue as the subject of a BAR interview (“BAR Interviews Yigael Yadin,” BAR 09:01).

In “Restoring the Reputation of Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope,” free-lance writer Neil Asher Silberman pulls a few pages from the early history of Biblical archaeology and makes a few deft additions and deletions to the text. Lady Hester was the first person to deliberately excavate an artifact in the Holy Land, but instead of preserving her find, a seven-foot-high marble statue, she destroyed it and threw it into the sea. Long considered an opportunist and a vandal, Lady Hester, says Silberman, was really the victim of a hostile political climate in the Holy Land in the early 19th century. In fact, although she was compelled to destroy an ancient artifact, her excavation of Ashkelon constituted a milestone for modern archaeology.

A popular BAR author, Silberman reviewed Adventurer in Archaeology: The Biography of Sir Mortimer Wheeler for the March/April issue (Books in Brief, BAR 10:02). This fall, Silberman will begin a two-year Crane-Rogers Foundation fellowship of travel and investigative archaeological reporting in Israel, Egypt and Jordan.

This past April, the International Congress on Biblical Archaeology in Jerusalem welcomed 800 scholars and nonscholars from around the world, including 70 members of BAR’s Congress tour group. In “Jerusalem Rolls Out Red Carpet for Biblical Archaeology Congress,” BAR editor Hershel Shanks reports on this banner event, including some of the more sensitive and controversial issues the lectures raised. When will the Dead Sea Scrolls finally be published? Does Biblical archaeology start only with the Israelite occupation of Canaan, or does Biblical archaeology have relevance to earlier periods as well?

Bare granite mountains and mile after mile of sand interrupted here and there by an acacia tree—until 1967, this was the image conjured by the word “Sinai.” But in that year, following the Six Day War, Israeli archaeologists started exploring Sinai. For the next 15 years—until Sinai was returned to Egypt as part of the Camp David peace accords—Israeli archaeologists conducted hundreds of surveys and excavations. The result: rediscoveries of sites long forgotten and surprising new discoveries of cultures as old as civilization itself. These excavations have now collectively filled in numerous blank spots in the archaeological map of […]