Inside BAR

002

If archaeology ever produced a complement to the “Whatever Became of … ” books—a series about the fates of minor entertainment personalities—the Ammonites would surely be included. One of the ancient peoples of modern Jordan and a traditional enemy of the Israelites, the Ammonites quietly disappeared from the Biblical stage about the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 B.C. This led scholars to assume that the Ammonites too had succumbed to the Babylonians. Twenty-five years of modern archaeological excavation in the Ammonite territory, however, have overthrown this assumption, as Larry G. Herr demonstrates in “What Ever Happened to the Ammonites?”

Herr serves as professor of religious studies at Canadian Union College in Alberta. Among his publications are The Amman Airport Excavations, 1976 (ASOR, 1983) and The Scripts of Ancient Northwest Semitic (Scholars Press, 1978). Herr currently directs the Tell el-‘Umeiri excavation, part of the Madaba Plains Project in Jordan. He contributed “An Off-Duty Archaeologist Looks at Psalm 23,” to the April 1992 Bible Review, BAR’s companion magazine.

A lot of treasure hunters can put away their shovels if Manfred R. Lehmann is right. In “Where the Temple Tax Was Buried—The Key to Understanding the Copper Scroll,” Lehmann deduces from the scroll’s text that the hoard of gold and silver, whose 64 locations the scroll describes, probably represents offerings to the Temple accumulated after its destruction in 70 A.D. The bad news for treasure hunters comes from Lehmann’s interpretation of a legend on a Roman coin, which suggests that the Romans found the treasure in the first century A.D.

Born in Sweden, Lehmann came to the United States in 1940. He studied under William F. Albright at Johns Hopkins University and received his graduate degree in 1946. Although he pursued a business career (he heads an international telecommunications company), he kept up his academic work and produced numerous scholarly papers, compiled last year in the 800-page Collected Works of Manfred R. Lehmann. Starting in 1958, his papers on the Dead Sea Scrolls have pioneered the use of Talmudic literature to understand the scrolls. The Manfred and Anne Lehmann Foundation, which he heads, owns the largest private Hebrew manuscript library in the United States, representing 1,000 years of writings.

For decades following the discovery of the Copper Scroll, the criticism of this incongruous Dead Sea Scroll has been that the vast amounts of treasure it describes mark it as a work of fantasy. But are the amounts truly so great when compared to other treasures mentioned in classical literature? That simple—but until now unexplored—question lies at the heart of “26 Tons of Gold and 65 Tons Of Silver—Too Much to Believe?” by James E. Harper.

Harper is the coauthor, with William I. Davisson, of European Economic History, The Ancient World (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972). His articles include “Slaves and Freedmen in Imperial Rome” (American Journal of Philology) and “The Tardy Domestication of the Duck” (Agricultural History). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and he is a past recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship.

What did the apostles eat for dinner? Probably St. Peter’s fish. At least that is what they often caught when fishing on the Sea of Galilee. And how did they catch them? With trammel nets, of course. In “Cast Your Net Upon the Waters—Fish and Fishermen in Jesus’ Time,” 003Mendel Nun uses his knowledge of fishing life on the Galilee—from ancient times to the present—to enrich our understanding of Biblical fishing stories.

Fisherman, historian and raconteur, Mendel Nun was born in Latvia in 1918 and immigrated to Palestine in 1939. Two years later he joined Kibbutz Ein Gev, on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, where he worked as a fisherman. Remembering the days before motorboats and electronic fish detectors, Nun (his name means “fish” in Aramaic) has become the area’s resident expert on the history of the Sea of Galilee and its fishing trade. He received the Ben-Zvi prize in 1964 for his book Ancient Jewish Fisheries.

An indispensable reference work just got better. The classic Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, edited by the late Michael Avi-Yonah, has now appeared in a four-volume, revised and expanded edition retitled The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, edited by Ephraim Stern. BAR editor Hershel Shanks reviews this long-awaited work, which incorporates descriptions of excavations conducted during the last 17 years.

The four, or possibly five, inkwells found at Qumran must be entered as evidence in the debates over what kind of community once lived at Qumran, argues Stephen Goranson in this issue’s “Fragments” department. Goranson, a visiting professor at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, specializes in archaeology, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

If archaeology ever produced a complement to the “Whatever Became of … ” books—a series about the fates of minor entertainment personalities—the Ammonites would surely be included. One of the ancient peoples of modern Jordan and a traditional enemy of the Israelites, the Ammonites quietly disappeared from the Biblical stage about the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 B.C. This led scholars to assume that the Ammonites too had succumbed to the Babylonians. Twenty-five years of modern archaeological excavation in the Ammonite territory, however, have overthrown this assumption, as Larry G. Herr demonstrates in “What Ever […]