Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1992

War—or rather two wars—made possible the current golden age of discovery in Jerusalem, at the City of David, at the Temple Mount and in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter. In 1948, during Israel’s War of Independence, the occupants of the Jewish Quarter surrendered to the Arab Legion following a long siege. Some houses […]

In 988 the Israel Museum paid $550,000 for a small ivory pomegranate in the belief that it was once the head of a scepter that had been used by the priests in Solomon’s Temple.a In so doing, the museum relied heavily on the authentication and judgment of one of Israel’s most highly respected senior […]

Nahman Avigad was born in the Galician town of Zawalow (then in Austria, now in the Ukraine), on September 25, 1905, the son of Isak and Perl Reiss. He died at age 86 in Jerusalem on January 28, 1992. His childhood and schooling took place in Brno, Czechoslovakia, where his family had moved, and […]

Nahman Avigad is dead. He died of cancer on January 28, 1992, at age 86. For much of his professional life he lived in the shadow of E. L. Sukenik, Yigael Yadin’s father, whom he served as assistant in such excavations as Beth Alpha and Hammat Gader. Sukenik, from all reports, was a demanding, […]

“A city set on a hill cannot be hid” (Matthew 5:14). Words spoken by Jesus almost 2,000 years ago spring to mind as I stand on a ridge at the edge of modern Nazareth. The hill, three miles north and 700 feet below, was the site of ancient Sepphoris. This beautiful Greco-Roman metropolis, […]

Pondering the events and images surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls in the past year, one cannot help but marvel at the rapidity of change and the degree of public interest in the usually sleepy hollow of the academic study of ancient texts. The “scandal of the scrolls” captured the imagination of the American people. […]