Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1993

Two American scholars have filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia against Professor Elisha Qimron of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, asking the court to break Qimron’s stranglehold on one of the most important still-unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls, known as MMT. A Jerusalem court recently held that Qimron owned the copyright on […]

In our BAR 19:04 issue, we announced that we would not appeal the Jerusalem court’s decision that Professor Elisha Qimron owns the copyright on the reconstructed text of the Dead Sea Scroll known as MMT. “Now the scholarly community,” we said, “will have to live with that decision—and deal with it in its own […]

Scholars attending a Dead Sea Scroll conference at the University of Eichstaett in Germany recently addressed a letter to the Israel Antiquities Authority calling for a renewed investigation of Qumran Cave 7, where several fragmentary Greek texts were uncovered in the 1950s. According to two scholars in attendance, some of these fragments may have […]

An editorial entitled “A Miscarriage of Justice in Jerusalem,” appearing in the June 1993 issue of The Qumran Chronicle, a scholarly journal published in Poland and devoted to research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, states that “scholars all over the world should be alarmed by the decision” of Jerusalem Judge Dalia Dorner in the case Professor Elisha Qimron brought against BAR.

The nature of the settlement at Qumran, adjacent to the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, continues to be a hotly debated topic among scholars and the educated public alike. The entrants in the debate are (1) a military fortress, a contention supported by Norman Golb of the University of Chicago; (2) […]

The Polish scholarly journal The Qumran Chronicle, which temporarily suspended publication, is once again on schedule. The February and June 1993 issues have already appeared. Editor Z. J. Kapera says he is confident that the journal will henceforth maintain its publication schedule. The Qumran Chronicle is published three times a year. Subscriptions are $66 […]

To the Bible writers, they were the bad guys. But they were nevertheless important. The Ammonites emerged east of the Jordan at about the same time as the Israelites appeared as a people west of the Jordan. Together with their neighbors—the Moabites, the Edomites and the Amorites (who also lived west of the Jordan)—the […]

In 968 Siegfried Horn of Andrews University began large-scale excavations at a site everyone thought was Biblical Heshbon. This was Tell Hesban (or Hisban). Horn, his chief archaeologist, Roger Boraas of Upsala College, and other staff members had participated in the influential Shechem excavations led by the dean of American archaeologists at that time, […]

One Dead Sea Scroll stands out as unique—in many ways. First, of course, is the material it is written on. It is the only one of the more than 800 scrolls in the collection that is written, or rather scratched, on copper—thin copper sheets. Obviously, it must have been an extremely important document. The […]

The Copper Scroll is one piece that doesn’t fit the Dead Sea Scroll puzzle. Inscribed on metal and consisting simply of a list of 64 locations where huge amounts of treasure are said to be buried, the Copper Scroll has divided scholarly opinion for decades: Is it a list of something real or is […]

For more than 50 years, I have lived at Kibbutz Ein Gev on the shore of the Kinileret, the Sea of Galilee. For much of that time, I have been a fisherman. The Hebrew letter nun (N) means fish in Aramaic. My former name—I was born in Latvia—began with an N. When I became […]

The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land