Inside BAR

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The Exodus was the formative experience in the early history of the Jewish people. The event, the people, and the places figure among the most familiar and awe-inspiring passages in the entire Bible. Divergent traditions abound identifying the route of the 40 year wandering and the location of significant occurrences. Scholars continue to grapple with the where and when of the Exodus. In this issue, four scholars bring their insights to the puzzles of Sinai and the Exodus. In “Has Mt. Sinai Been Found?” Emmanuel Anati places the holy mountain on the Negev-Sinai border, at a site called Har Karkom where he has been excavating. His evidence: campsites, altars, temples and an abundance of rock drawings of figures and symbols that Anati associates with Exodus events.

Professor of palaeo-ethnology at the University of Lecce in Italy, Anati is author of over 50 books and nearly 400 monographs and scientific studies on prehistoric and primitive art, archaeology and anthropology. Among his books is the best-selling study entitled Palestine Before the Hebrews (Knopf, 1963). As director of the Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici in Valcamonica, he has worked hard to develop international cooperation in prehistoric studies, organizing several major congresses on prehistory and heading projects for UNESCO. The center, which boasts the world’s largest archive of rock art, publishes slide sets, book series, and a periodical, World Journal of Prehistoric and Primitive Art. The center also offers a summer school program. Anati has led numerous research projects, including an archaeological survey of the Negev, where, in 1955, he first discovered Har Karkom, the mountain he suggests may be Mt. Sinai. Anati lives in the alpine village of Capo di Ponte with his wife and two children. His avocations include fiction writing and photography; many of the photos in his article display his talent.

William H. Stiebing, Jr. observes that Anati’s theory is but one of several that displace the date of the Exodus and settlement from their generally accepted slots in the 13th and 12th centuries B.C. In “Should the Exodus and the Israelite Settlement Be Redated?” Stiebing looks at such theories, including those of Immanuel Velikovsky, and condemns the impossible implications of radically redating these historic events. Stiebing’s recent book, Ancient Astronauts, Cosmic Collisions and Other Popular Theories About Man’s Past, which challenges not only Velikovsky but the “radical reconstructors” is reviewed by Oded Borowski in Books in Brief.

Associate professor of history at the University of New Orleans, Stiebing has excavated at Tell es-Saidiyeh in Jordan and at Sarafand in Lebanon. A native of New Orleans, Stiebing last summer sang the role of Émile De Beque in an amateur production of “South Pacific,” and this summer he will appear as Oliver Warbucks in “Annie.”

At many of the traditional sites associated with Moses and the Exodus in southern Sinai, including the burning bush and Mt. Sinai, archaeologists have discovered remains of Byzantine monastic settlements. Authors Aviram Perevolotsky and Israel Finkelstein observe in “The Southern Sinai Exodus Route in Ecological Perspective” that non-porous red granite rock may be the key to the monks’ settlement patterns in this region and may explain why the monks located important Biblical events in this area of southern Sinai.

An ecologist and anthropologist, Perevolotsky lectures at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv. For seven years he lived and worked in the Sinai desert as a director of a field study center for the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. His study of the subsistence patterns of the Jebeliyah Bedouins living in the same southern Sinai region revealed that the Bedouin often camp on top of or side-by-side with Byzantine monastic settlements. Finkelstein, a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, directed an Israeli archaeological expedition to survey and excavate southern Sinai Byzantine monastic complexes, and has most recently excavated at Shiloh, where the ark of the covenant once stood.

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In 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion opened up a new world to scholars when he deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics. In “You Too Can Read Hieroglyphics,” Old Testament scholar Carey A. Moore explains how Champollion used the trilingual Rosetta Stone to crack the mystery of hieroglyphic writing. Moore clearly diagrams Champollion’s ingenious observations and explains how to read these mysterious signs. Chairman of the department of religion at Gettysburg College, Moore has excavated at Tel Dan and Tel Gezer, and has published commentaries on the Book of Esther in the Anchor Bible series. He has also published a photographic history of Adams County, Pennsylvania, where he lives.

In Books in Brief, Lawrence Schiffman reviews Yigael Yadin’s popular book, The Temple Scroll. The Temple Scroll joins Yadin’s earlier works, Masada, Hazor and Bar-Kokhba as a superb transmitter of both the facts and the drama of archaeological discovery. Schiffman is professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.

Other books reviewed in this issue are Pharaoh’s People by T. G. H. James, Excavations and Surveys in Israel, a translation of the Hebrew publication that gives brief reports of recent excavations in Israel, Roman Arabia by G. W. Bowersock, and The Archaeology of Greece by William R. Biers.

The Exodus was the formative experience in the early history of the Jewish people. The event, the people, and the places figure among the most familiar and awe-inspiring passages in the entire Bible. Divergent traditions abound identifying the route of the 40 year wandering and the location of significant occurrences. Scholars continue to grapple with the where and when of the Exodus. In this issue, four scholars bring their insights to the puzzles of Sinai and the Exodus. In “Has Mt. Sinai Been Found?” Emmanuel Anati places the holy mountain on the Negev-Sinai border, at a site called Har […]