Inside BAR

002

If travel posters had existed in ancient Israel, one of them might have declared, “Come visit the exotic Land of Geshur!” Though tantalizingly close—just east of the Sea of Galilee—Geshur lay beyond the reach of normal Israelite activity. “The Israelites failed to dispossess the Geshurites and the Maacathites,” Joshua 13:13 informs us while listing the territories conquered by the Twelve Tribes. Geshur’s importance can be gauged from the fact that King David considered it politic to forge an alliance with its people by marrying the Geshurite princess Maacah. But the ancient Israelites were not the only people to whom Geshur was just slightly out of reach: Modern archaeologists did not begin their research in the area until 1987. Concentrating on five key sites that spanned more than two millennia, the excavators are revealing a region that was dotted by well-fortified cities and was busily engaged in far-flung trade. Moshe Kochavi, Timothy Renner, Ira Spar and Esther Yadin act as our tour guides in “Rediscovered! The Land of Geshur.”

Kochavi teaches at Tel Aviv University and has directed the Land of Geshur Archaeological Project since its inception. His other digs have included Tel Malhata, the surveys of Judah and Sharon, and Tel Aphek-Antipatris. Renner and Spar co-direct the New Jersey Archaeological Consortium dig at Tel Hadar, a joint excavation with Tel Aviv University. Renner chairs the department of classics at Montclair State University, in Jersey. Spar is professor of ancient history and archaeology at Ramapo College of New Jersey and research assyriologist and editor of the Cuneiform Tablet Project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Yadin is field director of the Tel Hadar excavation and a senior archaeologist at the Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology.

The Dartboard of the Gods? Nothing so exotic, says Yonathan Mizrachi, author of “Mystery Circles,” although there are plenty of puzzles concerning Rogem Hiri, a site in the Golan Heights with massive concentric stone circles. No one may ever know the origins of the name, which in Arabic means “Stone Heap of the Wildcat.” More basic questions—when and why the circles were constructed and their relationship to the burial cairn at their center—are yielding to scholarly research.

No Lord of the Rings, Mizrachi considers himself a “humanistically oriented social scientist with a great weakness for technology”—in other words, he has a strongly developed computer mania. This love of technology fits well with the needs of the site, leading to the use of computer-based research techniques such as ground-penetrating radar and lichenometry. Mizrachi has directed the research project at the stone circles since 1988. Now head teaching fellow and curator at the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where he is finishing his graduate work, Mizrachi received his undergraduate degree from Tel Aviv University.

What happens when the impregnable meets the implacable? At Masada, site of the final desperate struggle in the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–73 C.E.), the Romans won, largely through the systematic application of their martial technology and tactics. In the BAR 17:06, we saw how the Zealots’ tactics in defense of the mountaintop palace-fortress of Masada staved off Roman victory for three years. Now Jodi Magness looks at the weapons and tactics used by the Romans to gain that victory in “Masada—Arms and the Man.” She also corrects a long-standing interpretation of a group of arrowheads found in Masada’s western palace, which proves to be the product of a Zealot smithy located on the spot where they were found.

Magness is assistant professor of classical archaeology at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. For a comparatively young scholar, she has excavation experience at an unusually large number of sites, including, as area supervisor, Khirbet ‘Uza, Kfar Hananiya and Emek Rephaim, in Israel, and 003Corinth, in Greece. She currently serves as the late Roman and Byzantine ceramics specialist for the dig at Caesarea. The technical version of Magness’ study of the arms and armor from Masada, on which she based her BAR article, will appear in volume five of Masada: The Yigael Yadin Excavations, 1963–1965, Final Reports, forthcoming from the Israel Exploration Society. Her first book, Jerusalem Ceramic Chronology: ca. 200–800 C.E., will be published next year by Sheffield Academic Press.

A special section of news from the BAS-sponsored Dead Sea Scrolls Research Council (DSSRC), “Fragments,” begins with this issue and will continue in future issues. Leading off the section is a highly informative and succinct overview of the scrolls and the status of the unpublished material, “Expanded Team of Editors Hard at Work on Variety of Texts,” by Emanuel Tov, the chief editor of the scroll publication team. Also featured in this section is an analysis of the highly publicized “Pierced Messiah” text, entitled “The ‘Pierced Messiah’ Text—An Interpretation Evaporates.” The rest of the section offers a cornucopia of news about the scrolls: new publications, conservation efforts, computer applications, lawsuits and much more.

Tov is associate professor of Bible at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His book, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (Clarendon, 1990), is the most recent volume in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series, the official publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Oxford University; it was reviewed in Books in Brief, BAR 17:02.

If travel posters had existed in ancient Israel, one of them might have declared, “Come visit the exotic Land of Geshur!” Though tantalizingly close—just east of the Sea of Galilee—Geshur lay beyond the reach of normal Israelite activity. “The Israelites failed to dispossess the Geshurites and the Maacathites,” Joshua 13:13 informs us while listing the territories conquered by the Twelve Tribes. Geshur’s importance can be gauged from the fact that King David considered it politic to forge an alliance with its people by marrying the Geshurite princess Maacah. But the ancient Israelites were not the only people to whom […]