Queries & Comments

BAR Spring 2024

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and comments about our Spring 2024 issue. We appreciate your feedback. Here are a few of the letters and responses we received. Find more online at biblicalarchaeology.org/letters.

More Controversy Needed

BAR needs to honor its founder, Hershel Shanks, by following his example with the Dead Sea Scrolls and in publishing much-needed articles on under-reported controversial subjects, such as the locations of the Temple and the Antonia Fortress, promoting further scholarly access to the Talpiot tombs, the finding of the Seleucid Akra in the Givati Parking Lot, and the underground Roman facilities (bakery, bath, theater, triclinia) lined up along the Western Wall.

MAHLON MARR
PEORIA, ARIZONA

We are proud of BAR’s legacy of bringing solid scholarship to the general public and honoring our late founder by reporting on a wide range of topics. We have covered many of the subjects you mention in various BAR articles or in Strata, but also on our Bible History Daily website. In addition, when scholarly disputes arise, we try to present both sides of the debate, as readers may have noticed in several recent issues. See, for example, the case for and against the authenticity of the Shapira Scrolls (BAR, Winter 2021) and competing views on the reading “House of David” in the Mesha Stele (BAR, Winter 2022 and Spring 2023). Even in this issue, epigrapher Christopher Rollston (Too Good to Be True? Reckoning with Sensational Inscriptions) highlights some recent sensational finds that unfortunately may not live up to the hype.—ED.

Offensive Style

Throughout the Spring issue, your articles vocalized the Hebrew divine name YHWH as YaH’WeH. It seems BAR requires its writers to use this term, which is highly offensive to most Jews. Please ask a scholar, who feels strongly about this vowellization, to present their case, given the absolute lack of any authoritative pronunciation of the divine name as YaH’WeH.

RABBI ARI MARK CATRUN
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

We certainly appreciate the religious sensitivities regarding the use of the divine name. BAR, however, is a secular, non-denominational magazine focused on presenting the latest scholarship on the Bible and archaeology to a popular audience. As such, our style reflects standard usage among many archaeologists and biblical scholars. In Parsing the Divine Name of this issue, longtime contributor and BAR Editorial Advisory Board member Ronald Hendel, who is a professor of Jewish studies at the University of California, Berkeley, discusses the evidence for how the divine name was pronounced and why that spelling is preferred among scholars.—ED.

Piecing Together Pottery

I was amazed by the photos of the restored drinking vessels and the storage jar in Yuval Gadot and Yiftah Shalev’s article “Lifestyles of Jerusalem’s Rich and Famous”. How do archaeologists figure out how all the broken pieces fit together? Are they scanned into a computer? And how are they held together? Superglue? A special adhesive?

GLEN W. SPIELBAUER
DALLAS, TEXAS

YUVAL GADOT RESPONDS:
Pottery restoration is a specialized field and truly an art form. Whenever during excavation we find large pieces of pottery grouped together, we bag them and send them to the restoration lab. In the lab, specialists use their experience, imagination, and patience to piece together as many sherds as possible. They use glues that do not shrink when dry and dissolve if necessary, such as certain acrylic and polyvinyl acetate adhesives. Remaining holes are then filled with plaster. You can view a video of the restoration process at facebook.com/ArchaeologyTAU/videos.

Right vs. Left

I read with interest Danielle Candelora’s article “Hands Off! The Severed Hands of the Hyksos Capital.” In her opening paragraph, she mentions they were right hands, but she doesn’t elaborate on this aspect of the discovery. I wonder whether the symbolism of handedness might offer an answer. Throughout the Middle East and Africa, the right hand is considered open, public, honest, and “clean,” while the left hand is often the opposite. Handedness is symbolically important in many areas even today. A traditional punishment for theft is severing the right hand, thus condemning the thief to a terrible asocial life. Similarly, if the Avaris hands were severed posthumously, the act might have condemned the victim’s soul to similar shunning in the afterlife.

PHILLIPS STEVENS, JR.
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY EMERITUS
UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, SUNY

DANIELLE CANDELORA RESPONDS:
As your interesting observations come from the Islamic period, they cannot be applied to the socio-historical context of ancient Egypt or Near East. In my academic articles, I thoroughly explore the complete lack of evidence for the severing of hands as a punishment for theft in both Egypt and the Near East, and there is also no evidence from the ancient world to suggest positive or negative connotations of the right or left hands. Some Near Eastern tribal groups were even named after left and right, likely referring to geographic directions, and neither was considered lesser. The right hand serves as both the hieroglyph and early alphabetic symbol for hand (in the sense that it is the Platonic ideal of a hand). Perhaps given that most people are right-handed, the punishment was considered more severe when the dominant right hand was severed, to interfere more with the convicted’s lifestyle.

Sudden Death at Azekah

The Canaanite temple at Azekah sounds very beautiful (Oded Lipschits et al., “House of the Rising Sun”). But I was puzzled by the description of the bodies they found: two in the courtyard and three probably on the roof when it was destroyed. Looking through the article, I found nothing to indicate what might have caused such a quick collapse that people didn’t even have time to get down from the roof. A fire or earthquake might have done it, but there was no mention of either. Do the authors have any thoughts?

JOANN MCFARLAND
STANFIELD, OREGON

ODED LIPSCHITS RESPONDS:
Archaeologists usually uncover evidence of past destructions. The reasons for such destructions, however, can only be suggested based on what has survived in the ground. We discussed the destruction at Azekah in a previous BAR article (Oded Lipschits et al., “The Last Days of Canaanite Azekah,” January/February 2019), but we continue to research the issue and will publish a more complete study in the near future.

God’s Anatomy Not Important

What is the relevance of Erin Darby’s review of Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s book God: An Anatomy? While I have not read the book, judging from Darby’s review I would not waste my time with it. I don’t know what this book can possibly add to my understanding of the Bible and biblical archaeology or my relationship with Jesus Christ. In my opinion, her description of the body of Yahweh and the sensory landscape of ancient human ritual life has no place within the biblical context of your magazine. I doubt if the disciples spent time trying to understand and interpret the physicality of the divine. Leave that trivia to the professors in the classroom.

RICHARD WOLCOTT
REDDING, CALIFORNIA

Egyptian Royal Brides

In his essay “Solomon’s Egyptian Bride: Artful Alliance or Biblical Boast?” Philip Stern cites the late Abraham Malamat asserting, in a 1958 article, that the marriage of an Egyptian pharaoh’s daughter to a foreign king was exceptional. The exceptional nature of such a marriage is well established for the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BC), when Egypt was at its most powerful. However, the situation was different by the time of Solomon in the tenth century, when there are records of several Egyptian royal daughters being given in marriage to officials and foreigners (see Kenneth Kitchen, The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt [Westminster, 1973]). Therefore, Stern’s conclusion that “the biblical allusion to Pharaoh’s daughter as Solomon’s wife seems not to be an idle boast” is well justified.

ALAN MILLARD
EMERITUS RANKIN PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND ANCIENT SEMITIC LANGUAGES
UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL

Sadly, Alan Millard passed away in June, shortly after submitting this letter to BAR, and author Philip Stern also passed away about a month before.—ED.

There may be another reference to Solomon’s Egyptian bride in the Bible. In the Song of Songs, the king sings to his beloved, “O fairest among women, follow the tracks of the flock and pasture your kids beside the shepherds’ tents” (1:8–9). Who else among women would see this as a compliment?

RICHARD E. FALC
RED WING, MINNESOTA

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and comments about our Spring 2024 issue. We appreciate your feedback. Here are a few of the letters and responses we received. Find more online at biblicalarchaeology.org/letters. More Controversy Needed BAR needs to honor its founder, Hershel Shanks, by following his example with the Dead Sea Scrolls and in publishing much-needed articles on under-reported controversial subjects, such as the locations of the Temple and the Antonia Fortress, promoting further scholarly access to the Talpiot tombs, the finding of the Seleucid Akra in the Givati Parking Lot, and the underground Roman facilities (bakery, bath, theater, […]