Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1993

The Jerusalem court has spoken: Elisha Qimron of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev owns the copyright on the reconstructed text of MMT, one of the most important, and still unpublished, Dead Sea Scrolls. Now the scholarly community will have to live with that decision—and deal with it in its own way. Our friends who […]

In a conference held at the University of Notre Dame on April 25 through 27, the complete set of Dead Sea Scrolls photographs was released in microfiche form.

Walk into the Madison Building of the Library of Congress (LC), turn left just inside the entrance, and you can gaze at what less than two years ago only a small handful of scholars were allowed to see: a dozen Dead Sea Scroll fragments from the collection of the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.

The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid 18–21 March 1991

They are the first family of Israeli archeology. Trude and Moshe Dothan each have more than four decades of experience in the field, having excavated such major sites as Hazor, Hammath Tiberius, Nahariya, Deir el-Balah, Akko, Ashdid and Ekron. In this first installment of a two-part interview with BAR editor Hershel Shanks, the Dothans […]

The City of Salt has been found. The late, much-lamented Pesach Bar-Adon identified it. Bar-Adon died in 1985 at the age of 77.

What may be an ancient Israelite house has been discovered at the one-time Egyptian capital of Thebes, dating to about the same time the Israelites were settling in Canaan (Iron Age I; 1200–1000 B.C.E.). The house was found by the Austrian archaeologist Manfred Bietak, who is directing a major excavation of Tell el-Dab’a in […]

At the beginning of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–73 or 74 A.D.), “the inhabitants of Caesarea massacred the Jews who resided in their city,” says the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. “Within one hour, more than 20,000 were slaughtered, and Caesarea was completely emptied of Jews.”1 Is it possible that a […]

Let me see if I have this straight. Some 19 centuries ago there was a group of Jews, citizens of one of the Judean port cities like Caesarea or Joppa, who fled their homes to escape the violence and confusion of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome and, reluctantly forsaking their native land, embarked […]

I suspect that some BAR readers have become hooked, as I have, on the mysterious site in the Golan known as Rogem Hiri (Rujm el-Hiri in Arabic). In the cover story of BAR 18:04 (see “Mystery Circles,”), Dr. Yonathan Mizrachi speculated that these immense concentric stone circles, constructed in the Early Bronze Age (3150–2200 […]

Ever since the premiere of the popular movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, hardly a year passes without someone claiming to have found the Ark of the Covenant, the disappearance of which is one of the most famous Biblical mysteries. According to a very well-known, ancient Ethiopian tradition, how ever, the Ark did not […]