Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1999

To say that you should throw out all your books on the archaeology of Jerusalem would be going too far, especially since I wrote two of them.1 But it is true that books on the archaeology of Jerusalem, including my own, now contain a lot of misinformation. More bluntly, they are wrong. The lesson: […]

Dangling on a rope ladder in a subterranean shaft, 30 feet below the City of David, the oldest part of Jerusalem, and 45 feet above the bottom of the shaft, I wondered whether I was being foolhardy. At 69, should I really be trying to re-enact the hypothesized entry into Jerusalem of Joab, King […]

Now that so much attention is being focused on the new excavations around the Gihon Spring and Hezekiah’s Tunnel—which was built as a defense against a siege by the Assyrian leader Sennacherib—it may be time to look at the siege itself. Specifically, was there one attack in 701 B.C., or were there two attacks, […]

For several years, we at the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) have been organizing sessions at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Our sessions have been exceptionally well attended and exceptionally well received. Criticism has been nil. In this endeavor, I have worked directly with SBL’s able executive secretary, Kent […]

Pottery talks. That’s a little secret archaeologists know but few outsiders are privy to. And pottery can talk—a lot.