Inside BAR

002

Until recently Beth-Shean, in the Jordan Valley, offered tourists little more than the giant tell on whose walls the Philistines hung the body of King Saul. But now this poor development town can also boast the largest and best-preserved Roman/Byzantine city in all Israel! As a result, the townspeople expect Beth-Shean soon to become a major tourist attraction. What can they offer? See the huge theater, the basilica, the fountain, the amphitheater and the heated bathhouse. Stroll down wide boulevards, enjoy beautiful mosaics and sculpture and do some shopping, too. If that sounds enticing, feast your eyes on “Glorious Beth-Shean,” excavated by Gideon Foerster, Yoram Tsafrir and Gaby Mazor; you’ll want to put the 6,000-year-old city on the “must-visit” list for your next trip to Israel.

Foerster is a senior lecturer in archaeology at Hebrew University. He and Tsafrir have co-directed the university’s excavations at Beth-Shean for six seasons, starting in 1980. Foerster has led excavations to Tiberias and to ancient synagogue sites at Hammat Gader and Horvat Shura, and is a co-editor of the Masada Excavation Reports. Tsafrir is a professor at, and the current head of, the Institute of Archaeology at Hebrew University. He has excavated at Rehovot-in-the-Negev and Sartaba-Alexandrion. He is the author of Eretz Israel from the Destruction of the Second Temple to the Moslem Conquest (1984, in Hebrew). Mazor directs the Israel Antiquities Authority’s excavations at Beth-Shean. He has also dug at Hammat Gader and at Tel Dan and, from 1984 to 1988, was chief archaeologist of Israel’s northern region.

We’ll probably never know who the Thomas Edisons of the Hellenistic Age were, but the inventions they left behind permanently transformed the ancient Near East, as Abraham Levy shows in “Small Inventions? They Changed How People Lived in the Hellenistic Age.” Although innovations like glass blowing and bivalve molds with keys represent a comparatively simple technology, the effect on society was as dramatic as the effect of high-technology in our own time.

Born in 1918 in Strassbourg, Levy went to live in a kibbutz in Palestine in 1934 rather than stay in “a country where books were burnt.” He volunteered for the British army in May 1940 and served for more than six years, including in the Libyan campaign and in battles in Greece and Crete. He also served in the Hagana, Israel’s pre-state army, through Israel’s 1948 war of independence. As assistant to the commissioner for rebuilding Jerusalem (1948–1956), Levy helped develop tourism in Israel. One of his ideas—replicas of antiquities as souvenirs—later became the foundation of his private business. Wrestling with the problems of recreating ancient artifacts spurred Levy to study production problems in antiquity.

Ancient inscriptions do not come with labels saying “this side up,” and discerning which side is up is sometimes difficult. In “Epigraphy in Crisis—Dating Ancient Semitic Inscriptions,” Edward LipinŒski contends that new discoveries have superseded some of the accepted wisdom in the dating of early Semitic inscriptions. He believes that a recent transcription of the Nora Fragment, published in “Searching for the Phoenicians In Sardinia,” BAR 16:01, is upside down and that it may date 200 years later than has been claimed. A more serious consequence, however, is that the origin of the Greek alphabet may have to be redated.

LipinŒski serves as professor of ancient Near Eastern studies at the University of Leuven, in Belgium.

The Dead Sea Scroll editors have tried to brush off their critics as “fleas” (see “Dead Sea Scroll Variation on ‘Show and Tell’—It’s Called ‘Tell, But No Show,’” BAR 16:02), but now more fleas than ever are harassing them, including a large segment of the public. In “Dead Sea Scrolls Update,” we report on the latest developments: the scroll editors’ scorn for a $100,000 offer to publish photographs of the unpublished scroll fragments, the real reason why the scroll editors keep the unpublished texts secret and the failure to meet the 1989 deadlines in the “Suggested Timetable.” In a special contribution to this update,“A Visit with M. Jozef T. Milik, Dead Sea Scroll Editor,” Joseph A. Fitzmyer describes his recent meeting with the elusive Milik, whose scholarly activities have been shrouded in mystery for more than a decade. Fitzmyer reveals what Milik has done in that time and what the prospects are for additional publication of the material assigned to Milik.

A Jesuit priest, Fitzmyer is professor emeritus at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. He compiled and wrote the definitive bibliography of the major publications of the Dead Sea Scroll texts, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study (Scholars Press, 1975, 1977).

Jesus cited it as one of the two greatest commandments, but countless modern Bible readers have been misled as to its meaning, because it has always been misunderstood, says Abraham Malamat in “‘Love Your Neighbor as Yourself’—What It Really Means.”

A prominent expert on early Israelite history, Malamat focuses on the interplay between the Bible and other ancient Near Eastern texts, in particular the documents from Mari, on which he is one of the world’s leading authorities. Malamat joined the faculty of Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1954 and became chairman of the department of Jewish history in 1970.