Biblical Archaeology Review, 1984

For a week in April, all Jerusalem was aglitter with archaeology. The occasion was the International Congress on Biblical Archaeology marking the 70th anniversary of the Israel Exploration Society. At the opening session, the Acting President of Israel, Menachem Savidor, greeted the audience of more than 800 scholars and nonscholars from 22 countries around […]

According to the Greek biographer Eunapius, the second most beautiful bath complex in the entire Roman Empire during the fourth century A.D. was located in, of all places, Palestine—at a site known as Hammat Gader.1 Hammat Gader lies just five miles southeast of the Sea of Galilee in a huge crater-like depression at the […]

No one knows where they came from. They produced the world’s first great civilization, yet they vanished from the annals of history for more than 3,000 years. Although they were conquered by foreign invaders, their language and literature survived for centuries. We call them Sumerians, and the land where they lived, a region between […]

BAR recently published a fascinating article by Gabriel Barkay reporting on his excavation of a small rolled silver amulet, dating from the seventh or sixth century B.C. When the amulet was unrolled, it was found to contain the tetragrammaton—the four Hebrew letters yod, he, waw, he that form the unpronounceable name of God, sometimes […]

The magnificent mosaic of the Byzantine church at Tabgha,a commemorating the miracle of the multiplying of the loaves and fishes (Matthew 14:19, Mark 6:41, Luke 9:16, John 6:11),b has been beautifully restored. The mosaic was originally the floor of a late fourth- or early fifth-century A.D. Byzantine basilica church on the northwestern shore of […]

BAR is entering its tenth year. For us—and we hope for our readers—this is indeed cause for celebration. We have, we believe, now demonstrated several things: 1. A widespread public is seriously interested in high-level scholarship in Biblical archaeology. BAR’s circulation is now over 100,000—making us the largest archaeology magazine in the world. 2. […]

New inscriptions from two different sites have reopened the debate about the meaning of asherah, a term often used in the Bible. Is it—or she—a goddess? Is it a holy place? Or perhaps a sacred tree? Or a pole? Or possibly a grove of trees? All these suggestions have been proposed at one time […]

Sir Leonard Woolley was, perhaps, the most famous archaeologist of his day. He was a man of enormous energy and a prodigious worker. Between 1907 and 1949 Woolley not only directed five major excavations in Egypt and Nubia, Syria and Iraq, but published the results quickly and in a highly professional manner. Between 1922 […]

We were driving south, along the Gulf of Suez, heading for our excavation site when our jeep broke down. Fortunately, it happened on a paved road, before we turned onto the desert track that would take us to a desolate site in the interior of the Sinai Peninsula, still 65 miles away. We […]

Rebecca S. Knudeson of Carlton, Oregon, is the winner of BAR’s Biblical Archaeology Essay Contest. Her prize is a $1,500 traveling fellowship to Jerusalem. Knudeson, a former elementary school teacher, was chosen from among more than 80 entrants by judges Menahem Mansoor of the University of Wisconsin and Kenneth Holum of the University of […]

“Tophet” is a Biblical word. It is the name of a place that was on the south side of ancient Jerusalem in the Valley of Ben-Hinnom, where the Israelites sacrificed their children by fire. It may even refer to the altar on which the sacrifices took place. The book of the prophet Jeremiah […]

In an article in the September/October 1981 issue of BAR (“The Remarkable Discoveries at Tel Dan,” BAR 07:05), John Laughlin identified an unusual installation at Tel Dan, in northern Israel, as an Israelite cult installation associated with a water libation ceremony. In explaining the installation as having been used in a religious water libation […]

One of the more eye-catching quotations from The New York Times reads like this:

The Biblical Archaeology Society and the Smithsonian Institution will honor the memory of the well-known Biblical scholar Mitchell Dahood by jointly sponsoring lectures by two of the world’s leading scholars in the field of Biblical archaeology, Frank Moore Cross and David Noel Freedman.

For two seasons in 1961 and 1962 (the second season lasted eight days into 1963) Moshe Dothan, then Deputy Director of the Israeli Department of Antiquities and Museums, directed the excavation of an ancient synagogue at a site known as Hammath Tiberias. Located on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, just 100 yards […]

Did you ever find yourself wondering (perhaps during a late-night movie rerun on TV) where Ben Hur is mentioned in the Bible, or where King Tiglath-pileser of Assyria appears? Maybe you want to know how closely Martin Luther’s famous assertion that humans are acceptable in God’s sight “by faith alone” echoes the words of […]

If there is anything that sophisticated students of the Bible know, it is that yam sûp, although traditionally translated Red Sea, really means Reed Sea, and that it was in fact the Reed Sea that the Israelites crossed on their way out of Egypt. Well, it doesn’t and it wasn’t and they’re wrong! Yam […]

Diane Wolkstein’s Inanna–Queen of Heaven and Eartha is a retelling, with commentary, of one of the major texts about the Sumerian goddess Inanna. This is a difficult book for me to review. I could not possibly be more in sympathy with its aims. As a historian of religion, I find ancient mythology a fascinating […]

Jerusalem, April 22, 1983

Dr. Ralph Napolitano of Bloomfield, New Jersey, is the 100,000th member of the Biblical Archaeology Society and subscriber to BAR.

In the March/April BAR, David Ussishkin reported on the Assyrian siege ramp and the Judean counter ramp that he excavated at Lachish (see “Defensive Judean Counter-Ramp Found at Lachish in 1983 Season,” BAR 10:02). His report, together with the review of his book on the Assyrian siege of Lachish, extensively illustrated with reliefs from […]

It is a long way from the Nile Valley of Egypt to the front page of The New York Review of Books but the fascinating story of The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979) by Elaine Pagels has traveled that far.

For thousands of years, the Sumerians were a forgotten people. No book recorded their achievements; no spade unearthed their treasures. The Sumerians had passed out of history, until, in the mid-19th century, linguists studying Assyrian cuneiform writing discovered cuneiform tablets written in another language. Linguists and archaeologists alike soon began to realize that in […]

One of the greatest Biblical archaeologists of the 20th century, William Foxwell Albright, left an unfinished book manuscript when he died in 1971. But this is no secret to his friends, students and admirers. BAR readers were told of the manuscript’s existence nine years ago (see “Major Unpublished Book on the Religion of Israel,” […]

If you really want to know about Philistine origins, come to Cyprus. Not that the Philistines originated here, but here the evidence seems clearest. The Philistines were one of a group of related peoples called the Sea Peoples, who emerged seemingly out of nowhere at the end of the 13th century B.C. As we […]

Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope, granddaughter of William Pitt and daughter of the third Earl of Stanhope, was the first person who ever intentionally excavated an ancient artifact in the Holy Land. In this sense, she might be considered the first Biblical archaeologist. But when Lady Hester unearthed a huge marble statue at Tell […]

Israel’s most celebrated Biblical archaeologist, Yigael Yadin, died of a heart attack on June 28 at the age of 67. The world of Biblical archaeology has been impoverished.

As both an historian of New Testament times and a Christian believer, I can easily accept the possibility that Jesus’ burial cloth might have survived for two millennia. On the other hand, my Christian faith in no way depends on the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. So I thought I could approach the […]

On August 1, 1960, I received a letter from a man who identified himself as a Virginia clergyman. The letter stated that the writer was in a position to negotiate the sale of “important, authentic discoveries of Dead Sea Scrolls.” Obviously, he contacted me because of my intimate involvement in Israel’s acquisition of the […]

“It was different then,” the archaeologist said. “Today there are institutes and technicians, engineers, directors and subdirectors!” “Back then, we had nothing,” he said. “But it was a wonderful period. A time of life. A time of courage; no, more than courage. There was a greatness to it all. Beth She’arim was an example […]

You can dig at Tell el-‘Umeiri in Jordan, a tell that has never been dug. You can explore David’s Jerusalem, where several bullae or letter seals bearing names of First Temple period Jerusalem residents have been discovered. You can don scuba gear and descend to the first Roman shipwreck discovered off the coast of […]

In the late eighth century B.C., Lachish was the second most important city in the kingdom of Judah. Only Jerusalem surpassed it. At that time, Assyria had risen to unprecedented power, dominating the known world. On the eve of Sennacherib’s accession to the Assyrian throne in 705 B.C., the Assyrian empire extended from Elam […]

The forger has struck again—this time he managed to fool some of the world’s foremost scholars. Although at least some of his forgeries have now been discovered, the forger himself remains at large. And the problem of archaeological forgeries persists. The following may be just the tip of the iceberg. This chapter in the […]

Supreme Court Justices are paid to decide difficult cases. In 1951, however, Justice Felix Frankfurter heard a case he couldn’t decide.a His brethren voted to affirm the decision of the court below. But Justice Frankfurter couldn’t make up his mind. So he took the unusual—perhaps unique—step of filing an opinion neither affirming nor reversing, […]

Yigael Yadin’s magnificent edition of the Temple Scroll1—the latest-to-be-published and the longest of all the Dead Sea Scrolls—has been available to scholars in Hebrew for over four years and last year became available in a three-volume English edition. (See “The Temple Scroll—The Longest and Most Recently Discovered Dead Sea Scroll,” in this issue, by […]

Our expedition to Lachish is described in detail in the review/article “Destruction of Judean Fortress Portrayed in Dramatic Eighth-Century B.C. Pictures.” In this brief note I would like to describe for BAR readers the exciting results of our 1983 season, in which, for the first time, we extensively excavated the Assyrian siege ramp outside […]

In the King James Version of the Bible, it’s translated unicorn. But that’s not what re’em means. Re’em is the Hebrew name for Oryx leucoryx or oryx for short. This animal is also called the Arabian oryx, the White oryx and the Beatrix oryx because it used to be found in the Arabian desert […]

On January 29, 1935, during the third season of excavations at Tell ed-Duweir, a site thought to be Biblical Lachish, archaeologists discovered a collection of 18 ostraca, or inscribed potsherds. The ostraca had been covered by a thick layer of destruction debris on the floor of a guardroom in the upper gate. The archaeologists […]

Biblical Archaeology Society is please to announce the winners of the 1984 Publication Awards in Seven Categories: 1. Best Popular Book on Archaeology Discovering Jerusalem: Recent Archaeological Excavations in the Upper City