Biblical Archaeology Review, September 1975

Popular accounts of archaeological excavations serve a double purpose: For the non-professional, they provide readable and comprehensive summaries; for the scholar, they serve as a temporary substitute for the excavator’s final report which, unfortunately, is often long delayed. Thus, for example, both layman and scholar can be grateful for Kathleen Kenyon’s Digging Up Jericho, […]

Despite heightened tensions, an expectation that sooner or later there will be another war, and a near-universal dislike of Secretary Kissinger, archaeology continues in Israel, if anything on an even larger scale, as if the Israelis were saying “Despite it all, we shall continue with the things that are really important; we shall not let matters of war and peace over which we have so little control deter us from pursuing a way of life that we can control and create.”

What is not in doubt is that Kathleen Kenyon is virulently anti-Zionist. The more subtle question is whether this affects her work as an archaeologist. It is not hard to find Israelis who think it does. Others suggest it is only a professional cantankerousness that so often sets her against Israeli archaeologists. In any […]

Yigael Yadin’s popular volume on Hazor has now been published by Random House. Titled Hazor, The Rediscovery of a Great Citadel of the Bible, the book is priced at $20.00. In format and style, it follows the author’s highly successful accounts of his excavations at Masada and in the so-called Bar-Kokhba caves on the […]

One of the best known insights in E. A. Speiser’s Genesis (the Anchor Bible series) is wrong, according to independent studies by Professor R. David Freedman of the University of California, Davis and Professor Samuel Greengus of Hebrew Union College. Speiser, they say, misunderstood the Hurrian material from Nuzi on which he relied.

Part of the so-called lost tribes of Israel appear to have been located. In 721 B.C., the northern Kingdom of Israel, composed of ten of the ancient Israelite tribes descended from the sons of Jacob, was conquered and destroyed by Assyria.