Amnon Ben-Tor, Zeev Weiss and Jodi Magness have each been awarded a 2006 Irene Levi-Sala Prize for Books on the Archaeology of Israel.
Dr. Ben-Tor was awarded $4,000 for two volumes of the final excavation report of Yoqne’am, Yoqne’am II: The Iron Age and the Persian Period and Yoqne’am III: The Middle and Late Bronze Ages. The first volume was published in 1996. According to the committee report on the awards, the excavation reports are “masterfully edited” and make an “important contribution to the settlement history and material culture of northern Israel.”
Dr. Weiss was awarded $3,000 for The Sepphoris Synagogue: Deciphering an Ancient Message Through Its Archaeological and Socio-Historical Contexts. Weiss, the director of the excavation at the Sepphoris synagogue, pays particular attention to the mosaics in the synagogue and offers, according to the awarding committee, “a well-researched and thoughtful commentary.”
Dr. Magness was awarded $2,000 for a popular non-fiction work on the archaeology of Israel with her volume, The Archaeology of Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine. The committee proclaims the book the “sine qua nonfor Byzantine and Islamic scholars interested in the Byzantine and Early Islamic periods.”
The prizes were awarded in May 2006. The members of the committee were Martha S. Joukowsky of Brown University, P. de Miroschedji of Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Lawrence E. Stager of Harvard University, and David Ussishkin of Tel Aviv University.
James Barr, one of the most significant Biblical scholars of the 20th century, died on October 14, 2006, at the age of 82.
Barr’s most influential work was The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961), in which he exposed serious problems with the linguistic theories and exegetical methods prevalent in the Biblical scholarship of his day, such as interpreting Hebrew based on questionable etymologies or theological views. Beyond his philological work, he also criticized the Christian fundamentalist approach to Biblical interpretation as irresponsible. He later explored the question of natural theology, concluding that, according to the Bible, God is knowable to humans through the created world.
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Barr did his undergraduate studies at the University of Edinburgh and earned a doctorate from the University of Oxford. After a two-year stint as a Church of Scotland minister, Barr became a professor, and throughout the course of his career he held professorships at Presbyterian College (Montreal), Edinburgh, Princeton Theological Seminary, Manchester, Oxford and Vanderbilt, where he retired in 1998 as distinguished professor (emeritus) of Hebrew Bible.
Upon his retirement from Vanderbilt in 1998, he moved with his wife to Claremont, California.
James Barr will be remembered by colleagues and friends as a gracious man and a scholar and teacher of the utmost intellect.—D.D.R.
Amnon Ben-Tor, Zeev Weiss and Jodi Magness have each been awarded a 2006 Irene Levi-Sala Prize for Books on the
Archaeology of Israel.
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