Features

60 Years with the Dead Sea Scrolls

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls changed many lives—arguably, including mine (as editor of BAR).

The Dead Sea Scrolls: How They Changed My Life

In this issue four prominent scholars tell BAR readers how the scrolls changed their lives. Harvard’s Frank Cross is the doyen of Dead Sea Scroll scholars; his views come in an interview with BAR editor Hershel Shanks. In the pages that follow, Emanuel Tov, the publication team’s current editor-in-chief, who replaced the controversial John […]

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When our 60th-anniversary coverage continues in the July/August issue, Geza Vermes of Oxford University recounts his work on the historical framework of the scrolls and the ideological similarities between the Qumran sect and the early Christians, and Lawrence Schiffman from New York University discusses how the scrolls have enlighted our understanding of Late Second […]

Monumental Tombs from Maussollos to the Maccabees
Heroes of Hanukkah Open Era of Jewish Display Tombs

Modi’in was nothing but a hick town in the second century B.C., about 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem. But it was the ancestral home of the Maccabee family who led the successful revolt against the Seleucid tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes after he desecrated the Jerusalem Temple and forbade circumcision and Sabbath observance. Mattathias, the […]

Past Perfect: Shall I Go to Bethlehem?

As the United Nations was deliberating over a resolution that would partition Palestine and recommend the establishment of a Jewish state, Hebrew University archaeologist Eleazar L. Sukenik, was pondering the risks of traveling to Bethlehem to see an Arab antiquities dealer who had for sale some ancient leather scrolls. Hostility between Jews and Arabs […]

Departments

First Person: Jerusalem Forgery Conference
Not how to make them, but how to detect them. By Hershel Shanks
ReViews: 4QSama—The Difficult Life of a Dead Sea Scroll
Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, Volume XVII Qumran Cave 4—XII 1-2 Samuel By Hershel Shanks
WorldWide
Italy

Strata

In History
BAR takes a look back at some important events in history that happened during the months of May and June.
Milestones
Boston University Names Newly Endowed Chair
Special Collections
Apocalypse Then: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan