Inside BAR

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“Balaam, son of Beor,” the name of the enigmatic Biblical prophet described at length in the Book of Numbers, has been discovered inscribed on excavated fragments at Tell Deir Alla in Jordan. Fallen from a collapsed wall, the hundreds of plaster fragments with their traces of red and black letters were first uncovered nearly 20 years ago, but the painstaking work of reassembling these many puzzle pieces and then interpreting them continues. One of the scholars studying the Deir Alla inscription, André Lemaire, has rearranged some of the fragments. He proposes a new reading of the first nine lines of one of the original inscribed panels in “Fragments from the Book of Balaam Found at Deir Alla.”

Chargé de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Lemaire has excavated at Tell Keisan and Tel Lachish. A distinguished epigrapher, Lemaire is already well known to readers for his recent BAR articles, “Probable Head of Priestly Scepter From Solomon’s Temple Surfaces in Jerusalem,” BAR 10:01, and “Who or What Was Yahweh’s Asherah?” BAR 10:06.

In an unusual glimpse of another part of the world, BAR explores Mesoamerica, a region extending from central Mexico to northern Honduras. Hundreds of years ago, some Spanish priests who settled in Mesoamerica believed that the Indians who inhabited that part of the world were descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel. Edward King, Viscount of Kingsborough, England, spent his fortune and many years of his life conducting research to back up this theory. More recently, some Mormon archaeologists have sought to prove that the Mesoamerican Indians came to this continent in three migrations from the ancient Near East. In “Lord Kingsborough Lost His Fortune Trying to Prove the Maya Were Descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes,” Howard W. Goodkind evaluates the validity of these hypotheses.

Howard Goodkind, former editor-in-chief at Prentice-Hall, executive vice-president of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., chairman of the board of Encyclopedia Britannica Ltd. in the United Kingdom, and coauthor of Confrontation, a novel published by Harper and Row in 1966 is now launched on a new career. Candidate for a Master’s degree in archaeology at Yale University, Goodkind is writing a thesis that explores the effect of federal government funding practices on state and university archaeological research.

In the ancient Near East, as in other parts of the world, lustrous ivory was a precious commodity. Tusks were offered as tribute (Ezekiel 27:15) and carved ivory adorned palaces and furnishings of kings and wealthy men. Knife handles and bowls were carved from ivory and veneers covered walls and furniture. Because ivory is durable as well as beautiful, a substantial quantity of ancient ivory artifacts have been found in excavations. “Ancient Ivory—The Story of Wealth, Decadence and Beauty,” displays some of the finest ancient examples and discusses a recently published survey of ivories written by Richard Barnett, retired keeper of Western Asiatic antiquities at the British Museum in London.

In BARview, BAR editor Hershel Shanks reports on the proceedings of a recent gathering of over 50 scholars studying the Dead Sea Scrolls. “BARview: Failure to Publish Dead Sea Scrolls Is Leitmotif of New York University Scroll Conference” discusses the problem of scholars’ limited access to scroll materials, as reflected at the New York University conference.

In a companion article, “BARview: Israeli Authorities Now Responsible for Delay in Publication of Dead Sea Scrolls,&rd Shanks calls on the Israeli government to release photos of the scrolls to all qualified scholars.

One scholar, David Noel Freedman of the University of Michigan, has recently completed his Dead Sea Scroll assignment. In Books in Brief, Shanks reviews The Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus Scroll (11QpaleoLev), which Freedman just published with the assistance of his graduate student K. A. Mathews. Also reviewed are The Oxford Bible Atlas (Third Revised Edition), The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, by Robert L. Wilkin, Christianizing the Roman Empire, by Ramsay MacMullen, and Hebrew Inscriptions: A Classifed Bibliography, by Robert W. Suder.

“Balaam, son of Beor,” the name of the enigmatic Biblical prophet described at length in the Book of Numbers, has been discovered inscribed on excavated fragments at Tell Deir Alla in Jordan. Fallen from a collapsed wall, the hundreds of plaster fragments with their traces of red and black letters were first uncovered nearly 20 years ago, but the painstaking work of reassembling these many puzzle pieces and then interpreting them continues. One of the scholars studying the Deir Alla inscription, André Lemaire, has rearranged some of the fragments. He proposes a new reading of the first nine lines […]