Features

Arad—An Ancient Israelite Fortress with a Temple to Yahweh

The Israelite fortress at Arad is unique in the Land of Israel. It’s the only site excavated with modern archaeological methods that contains a continuous archaeological record from the period of the Judges (c. 1200 B.C.) to the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple (580 B.C.). This distinction promises to make Arad the […]

The Saga of Eliashib
Office files found of commander of fort at Arad By Anson F. Rainey

036 Over 20 years ago, I was excavating a room on the south side of the Israelite fortress at Arad—it was the 1964 season—when Miriam Aharoni, wife of the director of the dig, came rushing over to warn us to be especially careful. We were uncovering an archive of old Hebrew letters, she […]

The Well at Arad
Excavating the missing link in the water-system of the Israelite fortress By Ruth Amiran, Rolf Goethert, Ornit Ilan

040 Arad is actually a double site—a large and spacious 25-acre Canaanite city and a small, three-quarter-acre Israelite fortress. The ancient sites are situated on a bowl-shaped hill six miles from the attractive, modern, desert city of Arad in the Negev. The Israelite fortress is on the northeastern height of the hill. Below […]

Jesus’ Tomb Depicted on a Byzantine Gold Ring from Jerusalem

In the May/June 1986 BAR, Yaakov Meshorer published for the first time an exquisite gold ring excavated just south of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (“Ancient Gold Ring Depicts the Holy Sepulchre,” BAR 12:03). According to Meshorer, the bezel of the ring (the part that projects from the finger) is in the form of […]

1986 Annual Meeting
Neolithic statues, God-fearers and a political candidate amidst the maelstrom

Four Days—700 Lectures

Dever’s “Sermon on the Mound”
Dever proclaims the “New Biblical Archaeology,” but he reaches unsubstantiated conclusions and gratuitously knocks the Bible. By Hershel Shanks

William G. Dever, the world’s leading academic opponent of the term “Biblical archaeology,” has now declared the age of the “New Biblical Archaeology”—and his support of it. Dever, the excavator of the Solomonic gate at Biblical Gezer, former director of the William F. Albright School of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and the leading candidate […]

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