Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1982

The archaeological time period known as the Iron Age—or the Israelite period, as I shall call it here—began in about 1,200 B.C. and lasted for about 600 years. In the Land of Israel, it ended with the destruction of the First Temple in 587 B.C. Scholars generally agree that the penetration and settlement by […]

Herod, the ancient world’s master builder, constructed a magnificent port city on the Mediterranean coast of Palestine. He called it Caesarea in honor of his Roman patron Augustus Caesar. Maritima distinguished it from the many other cities that bore this much honored name, notably Caesarea Philippa, another city in Herod’s kingdom, located inland […]

Of all the great seaports of antiquity, Caesarea Maritima is the only one readily accessible to underwater archaeologists.1 Many ancient ports, like Piraeus, the port of Athens, cannot be carefully examined because they are still in use. Other harbors of antiquity have silted in over the centuries and today serve a variety of purposes […]

The Washington Journalism Review, supposedly a monitor of media fairness and accuracy, has falsely and irresponsibly accused Professor Hans Goedicke of The Johns Hopkins University of attempting to pull off an academic fraud.a In the article by Washington Post reporter Lee Lescaze, the Washington Journalism Review charged Goedicke, head of the Department of Near […]

“American archaeological efforts in the Holy Land have been dominated by Protestants,” according to a prominent American Protestant archaeologist, Gus Van Beek. Van Beek is curator of Old World archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and for many years was director of excavations at Tell Jemmeh in southern Israel. Van Beek said that […]

Mitchell Dahood is dead at 60. He died in Rome on March 8 of a sudden, unexpected and massive heart attack. I should write Father Mitchell Dahood, for he was a Roman Catholic priest, a Jesuit, who spent nearly 20 years teaching at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. But I, like most of the scholarly […]

In the 1930’s, the famous archaeologist William Foxwell Albright excavated Tell Beit Mirsim in central Israel. He discovered rows and rows of large stone basins. The dean of Biblical archaeologists was puzzled. Was this some sort of a factory? And if it was, what was manufactured here? Each basin had a small circular hole […]