Inside BAR
It is one of the most enigmatic images in the New Testament: “I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and a blasphemous name upon its heads … Then I saw another beast which rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon … it causes all … to be marked on the right hand or the forehead … Let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast … its number is 666.” Can archaeology possibly shed light on this passage from Revelation 13? The answer, surprisingly, is yes, and the place to look is a city in western Asia Minor. In “Ephesus—Key to a Vision in Revelation,” Steven Friesen describes the city’s ancient remains—including a magnificent library and the theater where locals rioted to protest Paul’s preaching—and concentrates on an impressive temple and a bath/gymnasium complex built to honor the imperial Roman family. As Friesen explains, it is this emperor worship that is crucial to understanding Revelation 13.
Friesen received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1990. His book, Twice Neokoros: Ephesus, Asia, and the Cult of the Flavian Imperial Family, is forthcoming from Brill. Friesen wrote the articles on Ephesus, Corinth and Olympia in Archaeological Resources for New Testament Studies (Fortress, 1993); he has also contributed articles to the Oxford Companion to the Bible, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Friesen is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Center is working to establish a native Hawaiian culture learning center.
The spirit of Phoenicia lives on in every city with streets laid out in a grid and governed by zoning laws. These innovations in city planning appeared at Dor, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, and at other places, a century before they were codified by Hippodamus of Miletus. This is but one example of Dor’s Phoenician heritage that survived despite a succession of conquests by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and Greeks. Ephraim Stern explores this legacy in “The Persistence of Phoenician Culture,” the conclusion of his three-part article, “The Many Masters of Dor,” BAR 19:01.
Stern is the Bernard M. Lauterman Professor of Biblical Archaeology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the editor of Qadmoniot, a journal published by the Israel Exploration Society. His book, The Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period (Arts and Philips/Israel Exploration Society, 1982) won the 1984 BAS Publication Award for Best Scholarly Book on Archaeology. He recently edited The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (Simon and Schuster, 1993), a revision of a highly regarded reference.
King Herod was nothing if not audacious. Longtime BAR readers will be familiar with his numerous monumental building projects—the expansion of the Temple Mount platform in Jerusalem, the huge harbor at Caesarea, the fortified palace at Masada and the cone-shaped fortress of Herodium. Recently excavators have turned their attention to an area just south of Caesarea’s harbor and their efforts have resulted in “Uncovering Herod’s Seaside Palace.” Barbara Burrell, Kathryn Gleason and Ehud Netzer guide us through this sumptuous building and sketch its dramatic position jutting into the sea. Two inscribed columns, found inside the palace, provide us with important new information on Caesarea’s post-Herodian history.
Burrell is field director of the Hebrew University/University of Pennsylvania excavations at Caesarea. She has taught at Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College and currently teaches at the University of Cincinnati. Burrell has excavated in Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey and Israel and takes a special interest in the portraits, coins and inscriptions of the Roman empire.
Gleason is project director of the Caesarea excavations and assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research on the ancient Roman landscape has led her to dig at sites around the former empire: Jericho, Herodium and Masada in Israel; the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill in Rome; Sardis, Turkey; Carthage; and Great Bedwyn, England.
Netzer, consulting director of the Caesarea excavations, is senior lecturer at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He served as architect for Yigael Yadin’s digs at Hazor and Masada. Netzer is director of the Hebrew University excavation at Sepphoris and has directed excavations at Herodium and Jericho. He has appeared twice recently in these pages, contributing “New Mosaic Art from Sepphoris,” BAR 18:06 (with Zeev Weiss,) and “The Last Days and Hours at Masada,” BAR 17:06.
When King Saul, in a jealous rage, tried to kill David, the young warrior fled with his troops to the Philistines and offered to serve King Achish of Gath. The Bible quotes David as saying, “If I have found favor in your sight, let a place be given me in one of the country towns, so that I may live there … ” (1 Samuel 27:5). The town that Achish gave to David was Ziklag, somewhere in the Negev—but exactly where is a matter of dispute. Scholars identified site after site as the elusive town. In “Where is David’s Ziklag?” Volkmar Fritz explains the archaeological evidence that disqualifies each of these sites—except the well-known tell firmly identified by others as Biblical Beer-Sheva. So, is it Beer-Sheva or is it Ziklag? Read the evidence and decide.
A professor at the University of Giessen in Germany, Fritz is well-qualified to comment on the evidence. In addition to participating in digs in Arad, Lachish and Beer-Sheva, he co-directed excavations at Tel Masos and directed excavations at Kinneret.
You may have heard intimations recently that Qumran was not the site of a religious community responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls. That it was instead a winter villa for ancient vacationing aristocrats from Jerusalem, or a military fortress guarding one of the approaches to Jerusalem. BAR editor Hershel Shanks examines the evidence for each of these competing theories and reaches a firm conclusion in “The Qumran Settlement—Monastery, Villa or Fortress?”
This issue’s “Fragments” features our version of “reality television”—call it “reality journalism”—in which Hershel Shanks takes you with him to obtain the testimony of John Strugnell, former chief Dead Sea Scroll editor, and then to the Jerusalem trial to defend BAS against Elisha Qimron’s lawsuit.