Israel Antiquities Authority Declines Dirty Money

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I have nothing against Shuka Dorfman, the director of the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA)—the few conversations I’ve had with him have been quite pleasant. But he sure does have it in for me. And I really can’t understand his wrath, although I do know why he’s mad. He’s angry because I didn’t tell him ahead of time that we were going to publish André Lemaire’s article about the bone box inscribed “James, the son of Joseph, the brother of Jesus” (it appeared in our November/December 2002 issue). The day after we published the story, the bone box, or ossuary, was on the front page of newspapers around the world, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune. When reporters came to the IAA for comment, they knew nothing about it.

And Shuka was embarrassed. More than that: He was mad.

To make matters worse, he had already issued an export permit to the owner of the ossuary for an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto last November and December. The export application quoted the inscription and valued the shipment, which included a second ossuary, at $1 million. But even that was not enough to alert the IAA to the extraordinary nature of the ossuary and its inscription. So Shuka was doubly embarrassed, and doubly mad.

Shuka didn’t get mad at the ossuary’s owner, however, who had applied for the export permit. Nor did he get mad at Lemaire, one of the world’s leading paleographers, who teaches at the Sorbonne and wrote the article for BAR. He got mad at me. He still won’t speak to me. When I called him on his private cell phone, just to discuss the situation, he hung up on me. When I was in Israel recently, he refused to see me.

If that were all, it wouldn’t be worth writing about. But Shuka seems bound and determined to “get even” with me—to the detriment of the State of Israel.

The exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum was an unprecedented success. Over a little longer than a month, nearly 100,000 people stood in line to view the ossuary. With the permission of its owner, we wanted to bring it to the United States for an American museum tour. Several major museums were eager to display it. But for this we needed an extension of the export permit that had been granted to the owner and which would expire on February 28, 2003.

The Embassy of Israel in Washington wrote to Dorfman, giving its opinion that an American museum tour would be a wonderful boost to relations between Israel and ordinary Americans. Dorfman was unmoved, however.

The National Religious Broadcasters association was to hold its annual convention in Nashville this past February, and the Israel Tourism Ministry thought it would be a great idea if the ossuary could be exhibited there for that event. The ministry’s appeal to Dorfman met with the same intransigence. The answer was no.

Yechiel Eckstein, a leading American rabbi with especially close links with American evangelical Christians, asked the Prime Minister’s office in Israel to intervene. Wouldn’t Dorfman listen to the Prime Minister’s office? Again, the answer was no. When Rabbi Eckstein called to tell me this, he confessed that he had doubted my explanation as to why Shuka was so angry with me; after all, what had I done, except publish an article by a renowned scholar without telling Shuka in advance? This could hardly have aroused such ire. But Eckstein now admitted that my explanation, hard as it was to understand, was accurate.

According to Israeli law, the IAA has the right to examine an object such as the bone box for three months. Dorfman wanted this examination to occur as soon as the ossuary was returned to Israel at the end of February. Since he felt he could not wait until after the proposed American museum tour to perform this examination, I offered to fly a team of investigators from Israel to the United States to examine the ossuary here (this would have been less expensive than shipping the ossuary back and forth to Israel). Once again, the answer was no.

But there was worse to come, leading me to conclude that though Shuka loves Israel, he hates the Biblical Archaeology Society (and me) more.

One of the most significant inscriptions ever found in Jerusalem, the Theodotos Inscription, is prominently displayed in the Rockefeller Museum, where Shuka has his office. It is a stone plaque that once hung in a Jerusalem synagogue before the Roman destruction in 70 A.D. In beautifully carved Greek letters, it commemorates Theodotos as archisynagogos (synagogue leader) and priest. It describes the facilities of the synagogue as a place for reading the Law and teaching the commandments. The synagogue also had an adjoining hostel with plumbing facilities for those coming from abroad. (Some scholars have even suggested that this is the Synagogue of the Freedman, referred to in Acts 6.) The inscription recites the synagogue’s history for at least two earlier generations.

The Theodotos Inscription was excavated in the years before the First World War by a French archaeologist named Raymond Weill. Weill found the plaque in a cistern in the oldest part of Jerusalem, known as the City of David. A few hundred feet away is the Gihon Spring, ancient Jerusalem’s source of water, where Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron are presently excavating.^a The Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS), in cooperation with Reich, is preparing an English translation of part of Weill’s French excavation report. In that connection Reich and I both had occasion to examine this report quite closely and learned two little-known facts. First, Weill made several other important finds in the cistern, including some architectural elements that may have been part of the synagogue in which the Theodotos Inscription once hung. Second, Weill excavated only half the cistern 025because the other half lay under a high embankment on which was an important path. The other half of the cistern might well contain unusually important information. As the leading authority on ancient synagogues, Lee I. Levine of Hebrew University, has explained, the structure that housed the synagogue is “difficult to assess…Were there perhaps two separate buildings, one for worship and one for lodging?”¹ How was the synagogue decorated? How did the water installations function? The answer to these questions might lie in the second, unexcavated, half of the cistern.

Unfortunately, the same embankment and path that prevented Weill from excavating the entire cistern are still there today, though somewhat modernized. Couldn’t we support the embankment with steel girders and then excavate? Reich said it could be done, although it would be quite expensive—and he was willing to excavate it if I could find a donor. My friend Sam Turner, a prominent Washington attorney, stepped up to the plate and I thought we had a done deal. I was wrong.

Reich had been working for the IAA when he was granted the permit to excavate the area around the Gihon Spring. Although he now teaches at Haifa University, he continues to excavate under the IAA permit. When he asked Dorfman to expand the area covered by the permit so that he could excavate the other half of Weill’s cistern, Dorfman asked him where he was going to get the money. Reich said that I had arranged it. Could he have the permit expansion? “Absolutely not,” was Dorfman’s reply.

When I told this to my friend Joseph Aviram, the long-time director of the Israel Exploration Society (IES), he said he would talk to Shuka. And he did. Joseph reported that Shuka told him that he would accept absolutely no money that came through me. If the dig was important enough, he would find the money elsewhere. If the donor would give the money not to BAS, but to the Israel Exploration Society (IES), he would accept it. (We have since found other projects to support with Turner’s donation.)

One final story. On September 19, 2002, Gideon Avni, the IAA’s director of excavations and surveys and formerly the district archaeologist for Jerusalem, wrote me a letter to acquaint me with a new IAA project. Since 1948, the IAA and its predecessor had conducted nearly 4,000 excavations. “Unfortunately,” Avni wrote, “the publication rate of this vast activity is very low.” The current IAA management, laudably, wants to correct this situation. In many cases, the IAA has the data from which a final excavation report could be written, even though the excavator had died. The first step is to publish a list of important excavations that are available for research and publication. All that is needed are scholars to take the assignments and the funds to support them. Avni’s letter continued:

“I thought this project might interest you, as one of the pioneer ‘promoters’ of public and scholarly awareness to the problem of unpublished excavations. I have discussed with the IAA director the possibility of collaborating with BAR on promoting this project and bringing it to the wide scholars and public attention, and got Mr. Dorfman’s warm approval to discuss with you possible ways of cooperation.”

I enthusiastically responded, noting that we might be helpful not only in identifying scholars to undertake these projects, but also in finding people who would be interested in supporting the effort financially. 064Gideon and I arranged to talk further last November, when we would both be in Toronto for the annual meeting of Bible and archaeology scholars. We indeed did have a lengthy discussion in Toronto that ended on a happy note. But then I never heard from Gideon. When finally I wrote to him, he replied, “I must have a word with Shuka about it.” I don’t have to tell you the end of the story. The Israel Antiquities Authority—or at least its director Shuka Dorfman—has principles. It—and he—doesn’t need and doesn’t want dirty money.

I have nothing against Shuka Dorfman, the director of the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA)—the few conversations I’ve had with him have been quite pleasant. But he sure does have it in for me. And I really can’t understand his wrath, although I do know why he’s mad. He’s angry because I didn’t tell him ahead of time that we were going to publish André Lemaire’s article about the bone box inscribed “James, the son of Joseph, the brother of Jesus” (it appeared in our November/December 2002 issue). The day after we published the story, the bone box, or ossuary, […]