Queries & Comments

BAR Summer 2025

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and comments about our Summer 2025 issue. We appreciate your feedback. Here are a few of the letters and responses we received. Find more online at barmag.org/letters.

Job Well Done

I have been an avid BAR reader for many years. I also subscribe to several other archaeology magazines and want to compliment you on the cover of your Summer issue. In comparing this cover with the covers of other magazines I receive, the term “less is more” comes to mind. Your Summer issue catches the eye where other magazines clutter their cover with as much stuff as possible, thereby producing a cover that confuses the eye and causes you to look elsewhere. Your magazine consequently gets read first. A job well done.

DOUGLAS CAMPBELL
WARRENTON, VIRGINIA

After reading the letters published in the “Queries & Comments” section of your latest issue, I was appalled at the letter denouncing your magazine and its contributors. I find it wonderfully refreshing to get different viewpoints rather than a straightforward literal reading of biblical texts.

REGINA H. SOULE
BRIGHTON, MASSACHUSETTS

BAR Offends Christians

You have no idea how offensive your magazine has become to those of us who name Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. The last BAR I read, now several years ago, had an image of a grotesque figure on the cover and asked if it was the face of God (Fall 2020). That, for me, was the last straw. When an apology is published, with the commitment that BAR will engage the Christian community with greater discretion, that’s when I will consider reengaging. Until then, there are many, many other sources for archaeological news.

GREGORY DRAKE
NORTHBROOK, ILLINOIS

Indeed, the “Face of God” article stirred considerable controversy among scholars, several of whom refuted its claims in the subsequent article “Facing the Facts About the ‘Face of God’” in BAR’s Winter 2020 issue. But even when covering such controversial topics, BAR always strives to present the latest discoveries in ways that both accurately reflect scholarly research and are sensitive to the diverse views, beliefs, and concerns of our many readers.—ED.

Mysterious Mug

Regarding the mug stone presented by Shimon Gibson in “The Mysterious Mount Zion Mug,” were there any residues found in it to indicate what was drunk from it?

ELLIOT WERNER
RADNOR, PENNSYLVANIA

SHIMON GIBSON RESPONDS:
It is a truly unusual and exceptional vessel, in that it is inscribed. But many thousands of similar but uninscribed vessels have turned up in excavations in Jerusalem and at Jewish urban and village sites of the early Roman period across Israel and even in neighboring Jordan. I surmise they were used for the washing of hands (netilat yadaim, in Hebrew) rather than for drinking, but to the best of my knowledge no residue analysis has yet been undertaken on such vessels.

Women and Prophecy

I enjoyed the Summer issue but had issues with the article “Women and Prophecy in Biblical Israel,” by Susan Ackerman. The author makes two statements about women prophets that are just as true for men prophets.

First, referring to Miriam’s leading Israel in song, Ackerman states, “Our definition of the Bible’s women prophets, therefore, may need to expand to include the roles they had as musicians.” However, David is called a prophet in Acts 2, and he’s also the Bible’s most famous musician. Elisha uses music while listening for God’s direction. Habakkuk writes his last chapter as a song to be accompanied by stringed instruments. And Isaiah includes, among many other poetic passages, the Song of the Vineyard. So how is music as part of prophecy something distinctive to women?

Second, she writes, “Rather, like women today, ancient Israel’s women prophets were the ultimate multitaskers.” Let me point out that Elisha is involved in construction; Saul (“among the prophets”) and Amos in agriculture; Moses, David, and Amos in sheepherding. On the other hand, there are women prophets for whom the Bible mentions no other occupation—e.g., Agabus and Philip’s daughters in Acts. So how are women prophets more multitaskers than men?

STANLEY SCISM
NORTH WOODSTOCK, NEW HAMPSHIRE

The Historical John the Baptist

Zeba Crook’s review of the book John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical Baptizer (Eerdmans, 2024) contains the coded words “history” and “historical” throughout. In my experience, these have been code for “no supernatural allowed” and for the liberal view of the biblical narrative. It seems that when there is no “historical” evidence of a biblical setting or story, we end up with the liberal opinion taking precedence over the declarative statements of the narrative itself, in this case because “collective memory” is unreliable.

Crook is allowed to hold whatever view he wants. But it was perplexing to me how he could state that “none of the sources [mentioning details or settings of the life of John] was written by an eyewitness, or even likely by a person with access to an eyewitness,” when there are at least two Bible verses that unequivocally say otherwise. Luke 1:1 lays out that many had attempted to write of the life of Christ “just as those who, from the first, were eyewitnesses and servants of the Word” and that he “carefully investigated everything from the beginning” (NIV). And John, himself an apostle who walked with Jesus, states that he was writing and proclaiming “the Word of life” that he and others had seen, heard, and touched (1 John 1:1, 3).

DAVE HART
LATHAM, NEW YORK

Misleading Jesus Statement

I was fascinated by the news piece “Law and Order in Roman Judea”’ but had to reread the sentence, “This is the best documented Roman court case from Judea apart from the trial of Jesus,” because that was news to me. In fact, there is no known Roman court record of the trial, nor is there apparently any contemporaneous account. I believe I understand what the author of that statement meant to get across, but I doubt whether I was the only subscriber to have a “Whoa” moment upon reading that sentence.

ROBERT A. DELL’AGOSTINO
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA

Interestingly, we had our own editorial discussion about this claim as well, but concluded, probably as you did, that the quoted scholar was clearly referencing the lengthy descriptions of Jesus’s trial preserved in the various gospel accounts (Matthew 27; Mark 15; Luke 23; John 18–19). Of course, in critical historical studies, it is important to distinguish between contemporaneous documentation and the literary retelling of an event.—ED.

The Writing on the Wall

I was intrigued by the short note about the “Writing on the Wall” (“Whence-a-Word?”). The biblical Mene, Mene, Teqel, Uparsin brought to mind an entirely different interpretation of that message that I learned from my father, Julius Freund, who some 50 years ago was auditing classes at UCLA.

I don’t recall if the ideas were entirely his own or arose from discussions in his Aramaic classes, but he offered the following rather amusing interpretation. The three different words denoted three coins, whose Hebrew equivalents were minah, shekel, and farsin. The wall inscription may well have been a graffito of three coins: a mina (worth many shekels) with the head of Belshazzar’s grandfather, suggesting he was a great king; a shekel coin with the head of his father, a lesser but still great man; and a farthing coined with the head of Belshazzar himself, suggesting that he was all but worthless in comparison to his forebears.

The meaning of that graffito was of course clear to anyone who saw it scrawled on the palace wall, but who would dare reveal its meaning to the king? Only Daniel had the courage to suggest to the king that he was a failure, and that his kingdom would soon fall.

DWIGHT D. FREUND
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA

Your father was clearly paying attention in class. The idea that the Aramaic words mene, teqel, and parsin reflect the names for weight units was first suggested in 1886, by the French scholar F. Clermont-Ganneau. In his article “Mané, Thécel, Pharès et le festin de Balthasar” (Journal Asiatique 8 [1886], pp. 36–67), Clermont-Ganneau offered several different readings of the inscription and Daniel’s interpretation. The first and the last of the words he understands as two different words for weights, one of which represents a half of the other: “one mina” and “two perases” (i.e., half-minas), connected somehow by the middle word, which might be another weight (“shekel”) or a different derivation of the verb “weigh.” The first to equate each of the units with rulers was likely Emil G.H. Kraeling, in his “The Handwriting on the Wall” (Journal of Biblical Literature 63 [1944], pp. 11–18). Although these ideas are intriguing, there is, however, no way to know how Daniel read (i.e., vocalized) the inscription and how exactly, in his mind, the pun worked.—ED.

Priestly Training Center?

I read with fascination the Summer issue’s news piece “Jerusalem Cult Shrine Discovered.” I wondered if the facility might have been a training center for priests chosen to serve at the Jerusalem Temple, rather than a “cult shrine” operating outside the writ of the Temple while being so close to Jerusalem. It could hardly have been unknown to the hierarchy in the capital that so often condemned non-centralized worship, yet it continued in use for generations, until Hezekiah’s reforms in the eighth century. A priestly training center would have made sense, since the Temple was in constant use for sacrifice and worship. After all, priests/Levites needed to be trained in their important duties.

ANDREW CARUTHERS
WENATCHEE, WASHINGTON