Inside BAR

004

BAR is very pleased and proud to publish Yigael Yadin’s first extensive, popular account of the latest to be discovered and the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. We are grieved and saddened, however, that this account is being published posthumously. Yadin died of a heart attack on June 28. The article, “The Temple Scroll,” is perhaps the last he ever worked on. In it he explains for a lay audience what may well be the crowning scholarly achievement of his fruitful life, his monumental three-volume edition of The Temple Scroll, reviewed in Books in Brief by Jacob Milgrom, Professor of Bible at the University of California at Berkeley. Yigael Yadin 1917–1984 is an appreciation of Yadin as military leader, politician, archaeologist and scholar.

One of the Temple Scroll’s many commands for the building of the Temple describes a freestanding 60-foot-high spiral staircase that would connect by a walkway to the Temple’s roof and would be entirely plated with gold. In “The Case of the Gilded Staircase,” Biblical scholar Morton Smith presents a surprising theory for the function of this extraordinary structure: Smith says the ultra-religious Essenes, authors of the Temple Scroll and the other Dead Sea Scrolls, included sun worship in their religious rituals.

A resident of New York City and an avid theater-goer, Smith is Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University and a member of BAR’s Editorial Advisory Board. His many publications include Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament, The Ancient Greeks, and The Secret Gospel. An early contributor to BAR, Smith wrote “The Differences Between Israelite Culture and the Other Major Cultures of the Ancient Near East,” BAR 02:03.

The unicorn is a legendary animal—romanticized since the Middle Ages as a uniquely beautiful and elusive creature. But perhaps a real animal—a desert antelope indigenous to the Holy Land—inspired these legends. In “The Biblical Oryx—A New Name for an Ancient Animal,” Bill Clark identifies a shy, horse-like antelope as the mythical unicorn and describes how Israeli conservationists are trying to revive the population of this near-extinct animal in its ancestral home.

Formerly chief curator of Israel’s Hai Bar Biblical Wildlife Refuge, Clark now combines careers as a teacher and free-lance writer. His course, “Biblical Wildlife in Contemporary Israel,” is popular among students at the Adult Education Institute of Conservative Judaism in Jerusalem. Clark’s longstanding interest in Biblical animals is evidenced by his book, The Paper Ark, and by “Animals of the Bible—Living Links to Antiquity,” BAR 07:01. Clark interviewed Israeli archaeologist Benjamin Mazar in “Benjamin Mazar Reminisces,” BAR 10:03.

The ancient land of Sumer, today located in eastern Iraq, covered the fertile river valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. Here, between 3300 and 1700 B.C., cultural developments matched the agricultural abundance of the soil. Archaeologists have revealed what many scholars now recognize as the world’s first great civilization. A special section of this issue of BAR illuminates the cultural treasures and achievements of the Sumerians. In “Woolley’s Ur Revisited,” Richard Zettler takes us through the vast royal cemetery in the city of Ur, excavated for 12 years by the famed British archaeologist, Sir Leonard Woolley.

An archaeologist educated at the University of Chicago, Zettler has excavated at Nippur, in Iraq, and at Tell es-Sweyhat, in Syria. He is currently working on a report on the Inanna Temple at Nippur, which he expects to publish in 1985.

The complex and fascinating Inanna was “Sumer’s most beloved and revered goddess,” say Samuel Noah Kramer and Diane Wolkstein, authors of Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth. Tikva Frymer-Kensky reviews the book in “Inanna—The Quintessential Femme Fatale,” claiming that Wolkstein’s portrait of Inanna is flawed and over-simplified. Frymer-Kensky is Visiting Associate Professor in the Program on Studies in Religion at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This past July, she joined Paul Jacobs in conducting the very successful Biblical Archaeology Society Vacation Seminar in Alfred, New York. A respected scholar of ancient Near Eastern religion and law, Frymer-Kensky will soon publish The Cosmology of the Bible and The Bible and Near Eastern Mythology. Her contributions to BAR include “God Before the Hebrews,” BAR 08:05, and “What the Babylonian Flood Stories Can and Cannot Teach Us About the Genesis Flood,” BAR 04:04.

Professors Ake W. Sjoberg and Eric Leichty of the University of Pennsylvania are editing a soon-to-be-published dictionary of the Sumerian language. In “The New Sumerian Dictionary,” William McPherson, a member of the editorial staff of The Washington Post, hails “the world’s newest and very first dictionary of its oldest written language.” Completing the Sumer section, “Sumerian ‘Firsts’” chronicles such other spectacular but little-known Sumerian achievements as the world’s first schools, first congress, and first tax reforms.

Also in this issue, we announce the 12 winners of the “1984 BAS Publication Awards.” One of the winning books, Ephraim Stern’s Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period, is reviewed in Books in Brief by Sharon Herbert of the University of Michigan.