Features

Ports of Galilee
Modern drought reveals harbors from Jesus’ time By Mendel Nun

Early 19th-century explorers, searching for places where Jesus had walked, attempted to locate the ancient harbors of the Sea of Galilee but failed. Now, after 25 years of searching and researching, we have found them. We have recovered the piers, promenades and breakwaters of the ports. We have also uncovered the ships’ anchors, […]

God as Divine Kinsman
What covenant meant in ancient Israel By Hershel Shanks

The covenant between God and the people of Israel “must be understood on the basis of political and judicial categories,” declares the highly regarded HarperCollins Bible Dictionary.1 Well, yes and no. In a groundbreaking new essay, Frank Moore Cross, one of the leading Biblical exegetes of our time and Hancock Professor Emeritus at Harvard, […]

Caught Between the Great Powers
Judah picks a side … and loses By Abraham Malamat

Rarely do Biblical texts and extra-Biblical materials supplement one another so well as those that describe the last two decades before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, which marked the end of the Judahite state in 586 B.C.E. As a result, we can reconstruct a kind of microanalytical study of this period. We can trace […]

Sacred Geometry: Unlocking the Secret of the Temple Mount, Part 1

Longtime BAR readers know that two theories vie with each other regarding where the Temple once stood on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The first was advanced by Asher Kaufman, a Hebrew University physicist with a longstanding interest in the Temple Mount, the second by Leen Ritmeyer, an architectural draughtsman who worked on the Temple […]

First Person: Don’t Buy Forgeries
(In other words, don’t collect) By Hershel Shanks
WorldWide
Ziwiye, Iran

Strata