Inside BAR

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Pilgrims to Jerusalem today try to retrace Jesus’ steps, from the house where legend says he ate his Last Supper, across the Kidron Valley to the Garden of Gethsemane, where, tradition tells us, he was arrested. Along the route, tour guides point out the spots where Jesus taught, prayed and slept. Although some of these sites may well be places Jesus knew, many became associated with Jesus long after his death and are almost certainly not authentic holy sites. In “The Garden of Gethsemane: Not the Place of Jesus’ Arrest,” Joan E. Taylor evaluates the archaeological evidence, the Biblical stories of Jesus’ last hours and ancient pilgrim accounts to determine whether what is now called the Garden of Gethsemane is indeed the Bible’s Gethsemane. Although the garden fails Taylor’s test of authenticity, the author proposes an adjacent site, venerated by ancient pilgrims, as the true Gethsemane, the place of Jesus’ arrest.

Taylor is lecturer and research associate in the department of religious studies at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New Zealand. She is the author of Christians and the Holy Places (Clarendon, 1993) and co-author (with Shimon Gibson) of Beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: The Archaeology and Early History of Traditional Golgotha (Palestine Exploration Fund, 1994). When not assessing the authenticity of Christian holy places in Israel, Taylor enjoys writing fiction, composing poetry and painting.

Celestial creatures known as cherubim appear more than 90 times in the Bible. They guard the gates of Eden after the expulsion of Eve and Adam from the Garden. Carved of olive wood, they stretched above the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple. Shining, hammered in gold, they adorned the Ark of the Covenant’s cover, their spread wings protecting God’s law. The prophet Ezekiel described them as multi-faceted beings—part human, lion, bull and eagle. In “Cherubim: God’s Throne?” Elie Borowski discusses the ivory cherub that appears on the cover of this issue—a panel being published for the first time. Borowski suggests that the cherub, in combining features of four different creatures, gives concrete expression to an abstract idea: the omnipotence and omniscience of God.

In “An Iconographic History: Symbols of Royalty and Divinity,” Tallay Ornan, curator of Western Asiatic antiquities at the Israel Museum, traces the history of such composite creatures. The sphinx, for example, ancestor of the Biblical cherubim, appears as early as the third millennium B.C. Like cherubim, sphinxes are found in holy places and are associated with gods and kings.

Borowski, a noted collector of Near Eastern antiquities, is the founder of the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. in 1946 from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and won a Lady Davis Fellowship in research at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto. In the mid-1950s Borowski worked as a consultant to European art dealers; he then began to acquire his own collection and to organize exhibits from various public and private collections—including the 1981 “Ladders to Heaven” show at the Royal Ontario Museum, which displayed objects relating to the Bible and its background.

Medieval New Testament manuscripts often preface each gospel with a portrait of the evangelist said to have written the book. Frequently the evangelist is depicted with book and pen in hand, while a winged man, lion, ox or eagle hovers above his head. Many illuminated gospel books omit the likeness of the evangelist altogether and 005include only the image of the winged beast. Recounting the evolution “Of Cherubim and Gospel Symbols,” Robin A. Jensen describes how these four beasts, described in Ezekiel’s vision and in a heavenly vision from Revelation, became the standard symbols of the four evangelists in western Christianity.

Assistant professor of church history at Andover Newton Theological School, Robin M. Jensen has written several articles for BAR’s sister publication Bible Review, including “The Raising of Lazarus,” BR 11:02 and “What Are Pagan River Gods Doing in Scenes of Jesus’ Baptism?” BR 09:01.

How do archaeologists dig? How have they dug? And, most important, how will they? Answering these seemingly simple questions requires a survey of the history of field methods over the past century—a survey that would illuminate not only the evolution of excavation techniques, but also the changing mindset of those doing the excavating. Thomas E. Levy takes us “From Camels to Computers.” Along the way, Levy describes new tools for digging, discusses some of the giants of Biblical archaeology and explains how high-tech is taking the study of the past into the next century.

Levy teaches in the anthropology department at the University of California at San Diego and is the editor of The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land (Facts on File, 1995). A California native, Levy’s international career in archaeology has included excavations at Indian sites in the American Southwest, at Tel Gezer in Israel and at nomad camps in Cameroon. Using anthropological perspectives, he has studied sites in the northern Negev since the mid-1970s. Levy’s article, “How Ancient Man First Utilized Rivers in the Desert,” appeared in BAR 16:06.

Did the patriarchs really live, or are they fabrications devised centuries later to dignify Israel’s past? In BAR’s March/April 1995 issue, Kenneth Kitchen argued that references in the patriarchal narratives to slave prices, treaty forms, geo-political conditions, names, Egyptian royal residences and inheritance laws match extra-Biblical data from the Near East of the early second millennium B.C.—confirming the Bible’s dating of the patriarchal age (“The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History?” BAR 21:02). Not so fast! cautions Ronald S. Hendel in “Finding Historical Memories in the Patiarchal Narratives.” None of Kitchen’s arguments is persuasive, Hendel says, though other evidence—a tenth-century B.C. fort called Fort Abram, stories about the partiarchs’ origins in northern Syria and the likelihood that proto-Israelites called their god El—does suggest that some traditions about the patriarchs are older than the first millennium B.C. (when the Genesis narratives were written down). Nevertheless, for Hendel, it is not possible to date the patriarchal age as precisely as Kitchen did, or to say whether the patriarchs lived at all.

Hendel, professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, and Old Testament book review editor for Bible Review, is the author of numerous articles on the culture and literature of early Israel. He is currently preparing a new commentary on Genesis for the Anchor Bible Series.

Pilgrims to Jerusalem today try to retrace Jesus’ steps, from the house where legend says he ate his Last Supper, across the Kidron Valley to the Garden of Gethsemane, where, tradition tells us, he was arrested. Along the route, tour guides point out the spots where Jesus taught, prayed and slept. Although some of these sites may well be places Jesus knew, many became associated with Jesus long after his death and are almost certainly not authentic holy sites. In “The Garden of Gethsemane: Not the Place of Jesus’ Arrest,” Joan E. Taylor evaluates the archaeological evidence, the Biblical […]