Biblical Archaeology Review, 2007

Our coverage of the 60th anniversary of the scrolls’ discovery comes to a close with an examination of the ruins of Qumran. Who lived there? Were they soldiers, ascetics or industrial laborers?

Every spring as Passover nears, TV audiences in America are accustomed to seeing Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Ramesses II, the putative pharaoh of the Exodus. For millions, the images from this classic film have shaped their understanding of the bondage of the Hebrews […]

In this issue, we offer Part 2 of our coverage of the 60th anniversary of the scrolls’ discovery. We begin with a question—Who wrote the scrolls?—and then take a look at the prevailing theories about who owned them, copied them and hid them in caves as Roman troops advanced across the Judean Desert in 68 C.E.

In a vigorous denunciation of the so-called Biblical minimalists, William Dever makes a very important observation on a subject not directly related to the Bible: A generation ago, even a decade ago, Classicists and ancient historians would have dismissed Homer as a mythical figure and would have argued that the tales of the Trojan […]

The Codex Sinaiticus contains the oldest complete copy of the New Testament—from the mid-fourth century. Originally, it contained the Old Testament too, but most of that is now missing. The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the big three—not Ford, GM and Chrysler, but Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and Alexandrinus—fourth- or fifth-century codices of the Septuagint […]

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls changed many lives—arguably, including mine (as editor of BAR).

Codex Sinaiticus, written around the middle of the fourth century A.D., is arguably the earliest extant Christian Bible. It contains the earliest complete copy of the New Testament. Only one other nearly complete manuscript of the Christian Bible—the Codex Vaticanus—is of a similarly early date. The only Christian manuscripts of scripture that are definitely of an earlier date contain relatively small portions of the text.

Most scholars believe the Dead Sea Scrolls (more than 900 of them) were either written or collected by a sect of Jews called Essenes, who are described by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus and the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo. However, the scrolls themselves make no explicit reference to the Essenes. Scholars infer the connection […]

The various theories about who lived at Qumran can be divided into two camps, according to whether or not one believes that an intimate connection exists between the scrolls and the archaeological ruins. This point is particularly important because some of the scrolls are clearly sectarian; that is, they describe both the beliefs and […]

In the late 1990s, authorities at the prison that sits near the base of Tel Megiddo in northern Israel decided they needed more room. Accordingly, an addition was planned within the prison compound and work commenced. It was not long, however, before the construction workers (prisoners) hit ancient remains. Work on the prison extension […]

What happened last summer, when many archaeological excavations were interrupted by the Israel-Hezbollah war, is past. And digs are gearing up again for the 2007 season. This year’s opportunities range from digging at the almost 30-year-long excavations of Emmanuel Anati at Har Karkom in Israel to further exploration of the newly found water system […]

HERSHEL SHANKS: Tell me a little about your background. FR. JUSTIN: My parents were Baptist missionaries. I was born in Texas, but when I was two, we moved to Chile. I lived there until I was nine. That’s why my accent is not a Texas accent.

In this issue four prominent scholars tell BAR readers how the scrolls changed their lives. Harvard’s Frank Cross is the doyen of Dead Sea Scroll scholars; his views come in an interview with BAR editor Hershel Shanks. In the pages that follow, Emanuel Tov, the publication team’s current editor-in-chief, who replaced the controversial John […]

5 Scrolls Still in Private Hands By James H. Charlesworth

The Quote Heard ’Round the World It was 1948—I was studying theology and the Bible in Louvain (Belgium) at a college run by French-speaking Jesuits—when I first read in the press about a sensational Hebrew manuscript discovery dating to the end of the pre-Christian era. In those days one had to take everything about […]

An investigation into the modern history of the Codex Sinaiticus is just one element in a much larger Codex Sinaiticus Project, the budget of which is nearly two million dollars. Of course the codex will be conserved with the latest conservation methods to preserve it for future generations. High-quality digitized photographs will be accessible on the Internet. A replica or facsimile edition will be published.

This article is an abbreviated version of my paper “What Has Nebuchadnezzar to Do with David? On the Neo-Babylonian Period and Early Israel,” in Chavalas and Younger, eds., Mesopotamia and the Bible: Comparative Explorations, JSOTSup 341 (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), pp. 330–355. The current debate over the historical value of the Biblical narrative […]

The Temple Scroll is the longest Dead Sea Scroll (over 28 feet, preserved almost to its entire length) and one of the most important. It was excavated by Bedouin in Cave 11 in 1956 (since then no more scrolls have been discovered at Qumran).

Of the approximately one hundred ancient synagogues from, say, 150 B.C.E. to 850 C.E. found in the ancient Land of Israel, an astounding 25 percent are located in the central Golan. How do we explain this? As it happens, one of the earliest synagogues is also in the Golan: the famous synagogue in Gamla, […]

When our 60th-anniversary coverage continues in the July/August issue, Geza Vermes of Oxford University recounts his work on the historical framework of the scrolls and the ideological similarities between the Qumran sect and the early Christians, and Lawrence Schiffman from New York University discusses how the scrolls have enlighted our understanding of Late Second […]

As so often happens in Israel, so it happened in 2003 when the Israel Railway Authority was constructing a rail connection between Ashdod and Ashkelon, those ancient Philistine, now modern cities on the Mediterranean coast: Ancient remains were discovered, work stopped, and the Israel Antiquities Authority was called in to investigate and excavate. What […]

This is the story of an excavation in Massachusetts—actually in Cambridge—more specifically, in the basement of the Harvard Semitic Museum. I was trying to understand the buildings in an ancient capital of Israel. I ended up finding what may be the tombs of the kings. According to the Biblical narrative, the United Kingdom of […]

Modi’in was nothing but a hick town in the second century B.C., about 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem. But it was the ancestral home of the Maccabee family who led the successful revolt against the Seleucid tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes after he desecrated the Jerusalem Temple and forbade circumcision and Sabbath observance. Mattathias, the […]

The second–third-century Roman historian Cassius Dio claimed that the Romans destroyed 985 Jewish villages while suppressing the so-called Bar-Kokhba Revolt, the Second Jewish Revolt. I believe we have excavated one of those villages at a site now known as Horvat ‘Ethri, just 15 miles southwest of the rebel capital at Bethar.1 At the […]

In the rugged hills of the south-central Golan, a monumental ancient synagogue is rising again—literally.

According to Dan Levene, an expert in Jewish magic incantation bowls, more than 2,000 of these fascinating vessels have survived.1 The vast majority bear inscriptions written in a dialect known as Jewish Aramaic and were produced in Jewish communities in Babylonia between the third and seventh centuries C.E. Precisely how they functioned, however, is […]

Several media stories recently reported that Bart Ehrman, a leading expert on the apocryphal gospels and one of BAS’s most popular lecturers, had lost his faith as a result of his scholarly research. This raised a question for us that is not often talked about, but seemed well worth a discussion: What effect does […]

Preparation for the Umm el-Kanatir reconstruction project involved several steps. First, small electronic chips were embedded in the toppled blocks to give each individual stone a unique identification number. Next, using a laser attached to the crane’s winch, a three-dimensional aerial scan was taken, which recorded the position and electronic ID numbers of the […]

If you’d like to see what may be a piece of the Second Temple (Herod’s Temple), pay a visit to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. I’ll tell you later where in the church it can be found.

The First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–70 A.D.), which ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple, was chronicled by the great Jewish historian Josephus. Much of his Jewish War, which extends to 681 pages in the standard Loeb Classical Texts edition, is an eye-witness account: Josephus commanded the Jewish […]

Everyone knows the Biblical story of Joseph (Genesis 37, 39–50). As a young lad he has dreams that predict his dominance over his brothers and parents. In retaliation, his brothers discuss killing him but instead sell him to traders who bring him down to Egypt, where he becomes servant to Potiphar, an officer of […]

After all, it had been fashioned by Moses himself a half millennium earlier—and for good purpose. In the Biblical passage that tells us what Hezekiah did, we learn of several other things the late-eighth century B.C.E. king destroyed: “He abolished the high places (or shrines; Hebrew bamot) and smashed the pillars (or sacred pillars; […]

The pendulum is beginning to swing back again. Before 20th-century archaeologists began uncovering it, Jesus’ Galilee was generally considered rural Jewish terrain. Then archaeologists made some astounding finds. Excavations at Sepphoris, less than 4 miles from Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth, revealed inscriptions in Greek, Roman architecture and some breathtaking Greco-Roman art, including the […]

In 867 the British engineer and explorer Charles Warren discovered a 52-foot vertical shaft, now called Warren’s Shaft in his honor, that for many scholars provided the key to unlocking the mystery of King David’s conquest of Jerusalem in about 1000 B.C.E.: By scrambling up this chimney-like shaft, which connected to Jerusalem’s water supply, […]

A major new excavation is being planned for the hometown of one of the most significant figures in the life of Jesus. Often referred to simply as the Magdalene, Mary Magdalene came from Magdala, an important fishing community on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The site is situated 4 miles north […]

The famous Ivory Pomegranate Inscription: Is it a forgery or authentic? You decide. And let us know your decision.

On January 16–18, 2007, the Biblical Archaeology Society sponsored a private conference in Jerusalem to discuss many of the ancient inscriptions that have recently been alleged to be forgeries. The participants included many of the world’s leading epigraphers and material scientists. Hershel Shanks’s fascinating report on this conference is now available electronically info at no charge.

As the United Nations was deliberating over a resolution that would partition Palestine and recommend the establishment of a Jewish state, Hebrew University archaeologist Eleazar L. Sukenik, was pondering the risks of traveling to Bethlehem to see an Arab antiquities dealer who had for sale some ancient leather scrolls. Hostility between Jews and Arabs […]

In the July/August issue of BAR, Norma Franklin describes in detail how she managed to identify two royal Israelite tombs cut into the rock beneath the monumental palace built by King Omri in Samaria in the ninth century B.C.E.a The palace and the alleged tombs were excavated nearly a hundred years ago by the […]

Frenchwoman Colette Modiano has traveled through the Holy Land several times since her first visit in 1967. Her book, Turkish Coffee and the Fertile Crescent (London: Michael Joseph, Ltd, 1974;), describes the places she visited, the people she encountered, people’s impressions of her, and her impression of the burgeoning relations among countries in the […]