Inside BAR
Masada! The name is immortalized as a byword for courage. It stands for one of history’s great heroic tragedies, a desperate struggle against overwhelming odds that ended with an eternally defiant mass suicide. In a mountain fortress beside the Dead Sea, the last contingent of unsubdued Jewish resisters fought the final battle of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome. For a year they withstood the Roman siege, but when their capture became inevitable, in 73 or 74 A.D., they chose to die by their own hands rather than be enslaved. An excavation of the site in the 1960s, conducted by the famous Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin, uncovered substantial remains from the conflict and supported some details in the first-century historian Josephus’ account of the events. Since Yadin’s death in 1984, additional work by Ehud Netzer has revealed remarkable new evidence that further supports Josephus’ narrative of how the Jews defended themselves in “The Last Days and Hours at Masada.”
Netzer graduated from the Technion University in Haifa as an architect, a vocation he has pursued along with archaeology since the late 1950s. He worked as a surveyor at Yigael Yadin’s Hazor excavation and as an architect at Yadin’s Masada excavation, where he was also in charge of the preservation and reconstruction of the site. As an archaeologist, he has directed or co-directed excavations at numerous sites, including Herodium, the Third Wall of Jerusalem and Caesarea. A professor of archaeology at Hebrew University, Netzer serves on BAR’s Editorial Advisory Board. The most recent of his many BAR articles was “Jewish Rebels Dig Strategic Tunnel System,” BAR 14:04.
Though the body of water that gives the Dead Sea Scrolls their name connotes morbidity, the field of Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship has been lively indeed lately. Our announcement in our last issue that we were about to publish previously secret scrolls made front-page news throughout the world and led to editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post. In this issue’s “Dead Sea Scrolls Update” section, we go one step further, publishing photographs, translations and commentaries on three never-before-seen scroll fragments. Also in the section, BAR editor Hershel Shanks reviews a recently published book that asks the provocative question, “Is the Vatican Suppressing the Dead Sea Scrolls?” Lastly, we publish a summary of a report on new carbon-14 tests on several scrolls; the results have important implications for the question of when—and by whom—the scrolls were composed.
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Talk about getting a bum rap—the Philistines, thanks to the extremely poor light in which they are portrayed in the Bible, have become synonymous with boorishness and lack of culture. The bad press has rubbed off on the Sea Peoples in general, of whom the Philistines were a part. But a review of the archaeological evidence, write Avner Raban and Robert R. Stieglitz in “The Sea Peoples and Their Contributions to Civilization,” shows the Philistines and their compatriots to have been major technological innovators, especially in naval matters and in architecture. Raban and Stieglitz’s reappraisal restores to the Sea Peoples a reputation befitting a nation that ruled coastal Canaan until the rise of the Israelite kingdom under King David.
Raban has been involved with marine archaeology throughout his professional career. In 1960 he helped found the Undersea Exploration Society of Israel, for which he remains a diving instructor. Raban is co-director of the excavation at the ancient port city of Caesarea and teaches archaeology at Haifa University and at Technion University in Haifa. He also leads field trips, underwater workshops, and study/sailing trips to numerous Mediterranean points of archaeological interest.
Stieglitz’s field work ranges from Hell Gap, Wyoming, to Coral Island, in the Gulf of Eilat, with much of it dedicated to marine archaeology. He is associate professor of Hebraic studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey and teaches classics at New York University. In the 1970s he served as curator and assistant director for the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, Israel, as well as Biblical archaeology consultant for the Jewish Museum in New York.
The Bible is not the only ancient source that fails to do justice to the Philistines. The records of Pharaoh Ramesses III have led historians to assume that the Philistines came to live in Canaan only with the approval of the Egyptians. Bryant G. Wood’s reassessment of the archaeological record has caused him to conclude that the Philistines came not at the behest of pharaoh but as conquerors who were barely repulsed at the very borders of Egypt. Follow their advance as “The Philistines Enter Canaan.”
Wood has been a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, where he received his Ph.D. He has excavated at Khirbet Nisya, near Ramallah, and at Tell el-Maskhuta, in Egypt, and has co-directed the Northern Jordan Dam Survey Project. His previous BAR article, “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?” BAR 16:02, generated a rejoinder by Piotr Bienkowski to which Wood responded in the same issue (“Jericho Was Destroyed in the Middle Bronze Age, Not the Late Bronze Age,” BAR 16:05, and “Dating Jericho’s Destruction: Bienkowski is Wrong on All Counts,” BAR 16:05
The latest BAR controversy would strain the judicial acumen of Solomon, but in the good king’s absence we will have to judge the merits of the case for ourselves. In the BAR 16:05, Frank J. Yurco identified some wall reliefs at Karnak, Egypt, formerly attributed to Ramesses II, as depictions of a campaign into Canaan by the pharaoh Merenptah (Merneptah), probably conducted sometime between 1211 and 1209 B.C. (“3,200-Year-Old Picture of Israelites Found in Egypt,” BAR 16:05). Even more startling, Yurco said one of the panels portrayed Israelites. Now Anson F. Rainey challenges Yurco’s identification of the Israelites. Although he supports the bulk of Yurco’s work, Rainey believes a different panel on the wall shows the Israelites. The dispute is important because the competing claims carry differing implications about the people who emerged in Canaan as Israelites. “Can You Name the Panel with the Israelites?” Yurco’s response appears in “Yurco’s Response.”
A native of Texas, Anson F. Rainey settled in Israel in 1960 and has taught at Tel Aviv University since 1963. He also teaches at Bar-Ilan University and at the American Institute for Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. His special interests are Semitic linguistics and historical geography. In addition to a M.Th. degree in Old Testament and a Ph.D. in ancient Near Eastern studies, Rainey has extensive archaeological experience acquired during his participation in 25 seasons of excavations in Israel, most notably at Lachish, Arad and Beer-Sheva. A frequent contributor to BAR’s letter column, Rainey has also written two previous articles for BAR: “The Saga of Eliashib,” BAR 13:02 and, with Ze’ev Herzog and Miriam Aharoni, “Arad—An Ancient Israelite Fortress with a Temple to Yahweh,” BAR 13:02.