Inside BAR

004

Legend swirls around Akeldama—the “Field of Blood.” Located at the juncture of the Hinnom and Kidron valleys in Jerusalem, the site has been traditionally identified as the potter’s field where “strangers” were to be buried. Matthew relates that the field was purchased with blood money returned by the remorseful Judas, Jesus’ betrayer. Today, the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. Onuphrius stands over the remains of a Crusader church built to commemorate the Field of Blood. However, the richly decorated tombs in and directly below the monastery belie their identification as burial places for poor strangers. The sumptuous architectural elements of these tombs, resembling decorative details found on Herod’s Temple Mount, suggest that this choice location, a mere half mile from the Temple Mount, was the burial place of important Jerusalemites—perhaps even the high priest Annas. Leen and Kathleen Ritmeyer weigh the evidence in “Potter’s Field or High Priest’s Tomb?” Leen also contributed the article’s detailed and evocative drawings.

The Ritmeyers met during their three-year assignment with Benjamin Mazar’s excavation team at the Temple Mount in the 1970s. Leen has a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester, for a dissertation entitled “The Architectural Development of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,” and has worked as archaeological architect on some of Jerusalem’s other major digs. Kathleen is an archaeologist who has dug at sites in western Ireland, the Outer Hebrides in Scotland and at Tel Akko, Israel. The Ritmeyers, frequent contributors to our pages, are currently working on a book to be published by BAS that will contain the results of the latest research on the chronological development of the Temple Mount and the location of the Temple.

The recent discovery of three additional burial tombs at Akeldama—untouched since antiquity and filled with a rich and unique collection of ornate ossuaries (bone boxes), glass vessels, oil lamps, gold coins and earrings—provides new evidence that Akeldama was not a potter’s field for the burial of the poor but the “Resting Place of the Rich and Famous.” Gideon Avni and Zvi Greenhut describe these exciting new finds and trace the use of these tombs from the Second Temple period to the Early Byzantine period.

Chief archaeologist of the Israel Antiquities Authority for the Jerusalem district, Avni has directed digs at Beth-Guvrin, the cemetery of Tel Goded, Har Oded, Luzit and Horvat Hazzan. He is currently preparing his Hebrew University dissertation on “The Necropolis of Jerusalem and Beth-Guvrin during the 4th–7th Centuries C.E. as a Model for Urban Cemeteries in Palestine.”

Zvi Greenhut is probably best known to BAR readers for “Burial Cave of the Caiaphas Family,” BAR 18:05, on his excavation of the celebrated tomb of the high priest Caiaphas, so identified from the name carved onto a beautiful ossuary found in it. Greenhut serves as Jerusalem regional archaeologist for the Israel Antiquities Authority. He received his master’s degree from the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.

Has there ever been a Dead Sea Scroll as eagerly anticipated as MMT? Its very existence kept under wraps for decades, MMT 005(an acronym for Miqsat Ma‘ase Ha-Torah, usually translated as “Some Precepts of the Torah”) has until now been officially available only to a handful of scholars. When a printed version appeared in the publisher’s preface of the Biblical Archaeology Society’s two-volume book of scroll photographs, Elisha Qimron, the Israeli scholar who was preparing the official publication, sued BAS for copyright infringement. In a decision still on appeal, the Israeli court awarded Qimron control over MMT for life plus 50 years. Now MMT has finally been published, and Professor Qimron has graciously permitted BAR to print the full reconstructed text in Hebrew and English: Scholars and laypeople alike can study MMT for themselves. See “For This You Waited 35 Years.”

After all the hoopla settles down, we are left with the question: Has MMT been worth the wait? BAR editor Hershel Shanks, in a review of the new Oxford volume, debates this point in MMT as the Maltese Falcon, writing that MMT might prove to be like the much-sought-after (but overvalued) Maltese Falcon, the eponymous statue in the classic 1941 movie with Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet.

Adding a different dimension to the discussion, Martin Abegg writes that MMT is indeed valuable, but in ways never before suspected: It helps us to understand the theology of Paul. MMT, suggests Abegg in “Paul, ‘Works of the Law’ and MMT,” may represent—for the first time—the “works of the law” decried by Paul in Romans and Galatians.

Abegg is associate professor of Biblical languages at Grace Theological Seminary, Winona Lake, Indiana, and a specialist in Dead Sea Scroll studies. He served as graduate assistant to Professor Ben-Zion Wacholder at Hebrew Union College, with whom he continues to work as co-author of A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls, an ongoing series of texts reconstructed with the aid of a computer and published by BAS.

The Bible may not change, but the tools for studying it certainly do. Thanks to advances in computer technology, a whole world of software is now available, providing speedy searching and cross-referencing capabilities and putting a host of atlases, maps, translations, reference works and pictures literally at your finger-tips. Steve Hewitt describes this “Revolution in Bible Study.”

The founder and editor-in-chief of the Christian Computing Magazine, Hewitt was a Baptist pastor from 1978 to 1992. He has written for such magazines as Your Church, Christian Retail and Christianity Today.

Does the inscription recently uncovered at Tel Dan refer to the “House of David” or not? Not believing in King David’s existence (at least as described in the Bible), Philip Davies disputed the reading of the inscription as bearing the first extra-Biblical reference to the “House of David” (“‘House of David’ Built on Sand,” BAR 20:04). Now Anson F. Rainey counters that such a dismissal is typical of the “deconstructionist school” of Bible critics. Davies is an “amateur standing on the sidelines of epigraphical scholarship who can safely be ignored,” writes Rainey in “The ‘House of David’ and the House of the Deconstructionists.”

Rainey is professor of ancient Near Eastern cultures and Semitic linguistics at Tel Aviv University. A leading archaeologist and teacher for nearly 30 years, he has published on such topics as the ancient city of Ugarit, the language of the el-Amarna letters and the historical geography of the Biblical period. Rainey has also excavated at Lachish, Arad, Beer-Sheva and Tel Gerisa.

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Legend swirls around Akeldama—the “Field of Blood.” Located at the juncture of the Hinnom and Kidron valleys in Jerusalem, the site has been traditionally identified as the potter’s field where “strangers” were to be buried. Matthew relates that the field was purchased with blood money returned by the remorseful Judas, Jesus’ betrayer. Today, the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. Onuphrius stands over the remains of a Crusader church built to commemorate the Field of Blood. However, the richly decorated tombs in and directly below the monastery belie their identification as burial places for poor strangers. The sumptuous architectural elements […]