Biblical Archaeology Review, 2006

There can be little doubt that King David had a palace. The Bible tells us that Hiram of Tyre (who would later help King Solomon build the Temple) constructed the palace for David: “King Hiram of Tyre sent envoys to David, with cedar logs, carpenters and stonemasons; and they built a palace for […]

Did King David do battle with the Edomites? The Bible says he did. It would be unlikely, however, if Edom was not yet a sufficiently complex society to organize and field an army, if Edom was just some nomadic Bedouin tribes roaming around looking for pastures and water for their sheep and goats.

In 876, Heinrich Schliemann completed a season’s excavation at Mycenae, where his faith in Homer’s text was repaid with spectacular success. Having excavated one of the shafts in grave circle A, close by the Lion Gate, Schliemann had come down on a burial containing the remains of a man whose face in death had […]

An archive of clay tablets written in cuneiform signs has never been found in what was to be the Land of Israel, although at numerous other sites in the ancient Near East archives holding hundreds and sometimes even thousands of tablets have been discovered. The illustrious Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin, who excavated Hazor for […]

Qumran, that desolate, supposedly monastery-like site with its ritual baths and communal dining room overlooking the Dead Sea, had nothing to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls found in nearby caves, according to a just-released study. Your vision of a couple hundred celibate Essenes padding around praying whenever they were not copying scrolls in […]

In the Book of Revelation, a prophet named John experiences a vision of the risen Christ, who asks him to convey a message to each of the seven Christian congregations of Asia Minor—Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamon, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodikeia. To the 028Pergamon congregation, this is the message: And to the angel of the […]

Ask almost anyone who has ever worked on a dig and they’ll tell you it was the experience of a lifetime. As we do in every January/February issue, we list here those digs looking for able-bodied and eager volunteers in the coming year. Whether you’re interested in ancient Israelite remains or early Christian sites, […]

The first Judahite royal palace ever exposed in an archaeological excavation is bei ng rediscovered. And with this renewed interest come echoes of what is probably one of the bitterest rivalries in the history of Israeli ar chaeology—between Israel’s most illustrious archaeologist, Yigael Yadin of Hebrew University, and his younger colleague Yohanan Aharoni, who […]

Fifteen years ago, I (Arthur Segal) sat in my study reading an article in BAR by Vassilios Tzaferis about Sussita, a dramatic site overlooking the Sea of Galilee that had been destroyed in a violent earthquake in 749 C.E. and had never been resettled. The columns of a church at the center of the […]

038 Standing stones are still a puzzle. They’re hard to understand. Standing stones have been found in the Near East from as early as 10,000 B.C.E.,a and they continue through the Biblical period. Massebah (plural masseboth) is the Hebrew word usually translated “standing stone(s).” Massebah and its variants appear 34 times in the […]

Phyllis Trible is surely one of the most distinguished feminist Biblical scholars in the world. In 1994, she served as president of the Society of Biblical Literature, only the second woman to serve in that capacity since the organization was founded in 1880. (And only two other women have subsequently received this annual honor.) […]

In 38 C.E. Christian Jerusalem fell to a minor Arab officer by the name of Khalid ibn Thabit from the clan of Fahm. The patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, had by then lost all hope of relief from Constantinople, since all the major cities of Syria (including Damascus) had opened their gates to the invading […]

The Onomasticon by Eusebius of Caesarea, Palestine in the Fourth Century A.D. Translated by G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville, indexed by Rupert L. Chapman III, edited and introduced by Joan E. Taylor (Jerusalem: Carta, 2003), 206 pp. + 8 maps. $44.95 She had traveled to ancient Palestine to tour the holy places, and now, after three […]

When Oded Golan first invited me to his home in April 2002, it was to examine an inscription on a bone box—but not the one bearing the now-famous inscription, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” That one was not even in Golan’s apartment at that time. He showed me only a picture of […]

Pottery is probably the archaeologist’s most important diagnostic tool, not only for dating a stratum of an excavation, but also for determining the culture and ethnicity of the ancient people who lived there at the time. In 1969, however, at the excavation of Tel Gezer, where I served as an area supervisor, a most […]

For many centuries the Protoevangelium of James was an enormously popular and influential apocryphal gospel. Written in the latter half of the second century, purportedly by Jesus’ brother James, it tells the story of the birth of Mary and, later, of Jesus. It is charming and moving and in the best gospel tradition. In […]

The Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, also known as the Bar Kokhba Revolt after its almost legendary leader, lasted from 132 to 135 C.E. Like the First Jewish Revolt of 66–70 C.E., it was brutally crushed. But, unlike the First Revolt (in which the Temple was destroyed), there was no Josephus to record […]

Israel first appears in an epigraphic source (that is, in a surviving ancient document) around 1200 B.C.E.,1 in a stone victory stele of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah. At the end of this long inscription, almost as an afterthought, the intrepid king informs us that he put an end to “Israel,” a group located […]

After the Romans destroyed the Temple and burned Jerusalem in 70 C.E., the Xth Legion (Fretensis) of the Roman army camped on the southwestern hill of the city, in the area known today as the Citadel, by Jaffa Gate.1 This was not, however, enough to stifle the resurgence of Jewish nationalism. In 132 C.E. […]

I was hardly in a position to say no. After all, in 1999 I was a mere graduate student. So when Professor Amihai Mazar, the head of the department of archaeology at the Hebrew University, asked me if I would talk to an American who wanted someone to undertake an excavation, I, of […]

A dig can start in the most casual of ways. Our partnership, for example, was hatched during a chance meeting in the summer of 2004. The encounter lasted less than a minute: Assaf: “Hi, Eric! Good to see you again. Want to reopen the excavations at Kabri with me?” Eric: “Hi, Assaf! Sure, sounds […]

Canadian documentarian Simcha Jacobovici, in cooperation with James Cameron, director of Titanic, has master-minded a two-hour TV special dealing with the oft-treated—and oft-mistreated—Exodus narrative. The Biblical account provides the principal pillar of the script. Every sentence of the Biblical text is taken literally in quite a fundamentalist fashion. Until now, Biblical scholars have not […]

056 David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (New York: Free Press, 2006), 343 pp. $26.00 David son of Jesse—warrior, king, poet, sinner—has fascinated writers, artists and scholars for more than three millennia. More space is devoted […]

Two centuries before the traditional date of the Exodus, a female pharaoh ruled Egypt. Very few women in the ancient world wielded any real political power. The greatest of these in ancient Egypt was Hatshepsut, who ruled for more than two decades (c. 1479–1458 B.C.) during the early part of the New Kingdom (c. […]

According to the Gospels, Jesus died and was removed from the cross on a Friday afternoon, the eve of the Jewish Sabbath. A wealthy follower named Joseph of Arimathea requested Pontius Pilate’s permission to remove Jesus’ body from the cross and bury him before sundown, in accordance with Jewish law. Because there was no […]

Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel

Nothing is more evocative of the Crusader period in the East than the often-imposing castles built by the Crusaders in what is today modern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Cyprus. Well over a hundred castles were constructed in the 12th and 13th centuries, ranging from simple isolated towers to huge, complex fortresses with […]