Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1992
Features
Biblical scholarship entered the computer age more than 20 years ago, when the computerized analysis of texts began. Only more recently have computers been used on the Dead Sea Scrolls. This kind of computer use may have reached its zenith in the work of Ben Zion Wachholder and Martin G. Abegg, both of Hebrew […]
The Biblical Archaeology Society has recently published Fascicle Two of A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave Four reconstructed and edited by Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin G. Abegg, both of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. Like Fascicle One, published last year,a the volume […]
The Biblical Archaeology Society’s advocacy of open access to the Dead Sea Scrolls and its publication last November of A Facsimile Edition of the unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls continue to bear fruit,a this time by advancing the education of a new generation of Dead Sea Scroll scholars. Thirteen graduate students in New York University’s […]
Over the last 45 years, scholars have had to rediscover the Dead Sea Scrolls hundreds of times—almost every time they tried to find a particular fragment among the thousands stored between glass plates in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. Some scholars have reported that the search sometimes took several days. But the recent publication of a preliminary catalogue of the scrolls may now put an end—at least in part—to such time-wasting searches.
The lawsuit brought against BAR in a Jerusalem court by Ben-Gurion University professor Elisha Qimron has been extremely draining financially. Qimron’s suit is based on our publication of a photocopy of a Hebrew transcript of the 120-line text known as MMT that originally appeared in a Polish Journal, The Qumran Chronicle. The photocopy was […]
Ben-Gurion University professor Elisha Qimron, who is suing BAR in a Jerusalem court, is not the only scholar turning to the law for legal redress in connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls. According to the Washington Post, the recently deposed chief editor of the scrolls, John Strugnell, now on administrative leave from Harvard University, […]
Dead Sea Scroll research is growing by leaps and bounds. Two new organizations have recently been formed—in addition to BAS’s own Dead Sea Scrolls Research Council (formerly the Institute for Dead Sea Scroll Studies)—to support and undertake research on the scrolls.
Not long after the unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls became accessible last autumn, Professor Robert Eisenman of California State University, Long Beach, disclosed that he had discovered among the hitherto secret manuscripts a small, five-line fragment that has since become known as the Pierced Messiah text.
It was about noon, Thursday, July 1, 1954. My wife and I had just seen our two sons off for their summer in Vermont. Our car was packed for a fortnight’s trip to Toronto, my wife was already seated in the car and I was locking the door when the telephone rang. We looked […]
Not without some justification did Absalom arrange the murder of his half-brother Amnon. Amnon had raped Absalom’s sister Tamar. Nonetheless, fratricide among King David’s sons was not to be countenanced. After Amnon’s murder, Absalom fled—to the land of Geshur (2 Samuel 13:20–38), where he knew he would be safe. His mother Maacah was […]
The mysterious site of Rogem Hiri (Rujm el-Hiri, in Arabica) was unknown to professional archaeology until after the Six-Day War in 1967 when the Golan Heights became accessible to Israeli archaeologists. It was discovered during the 1967–1968 archaeological survey of the lower Golan Heights. This unique site consists of five concentric stone circles, the […]
Sometimes we make discoveries not by digging in the ground, but by digging in the records of past excavations. So it is with Masada, Herod’s nearly impregnable palace-fortress in the Judean wilderness, occupied and defended by Jewish Zealots during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome. Masada was excavated in the 1960s by Israel’s most […]