Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2005

Few places better illustrate the layered history that archaeology uncovers than the little ridge known as the City of David, the oldest inhabited part of Jerusalem. For example, to tell the story of the Pool of Siloam, where Jesus cured the blind man, we must go back 700 years before that—to the time of […]

When modern tourists visit Hebron, they focus almost exclusively on the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a magnificent shrine built 2,000 years ago during the Herodian period over the traditional site of the Cave of Machpelah. The Bible tells us the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca and Leah were […]

When you look at a map, the first things you notice are borders. But what did borders mean in ancient times? In the mid-1990s, we became curious about that very question. Both of us had been excavating in Israel for more than 25 years—and during those years we’d always taken the importance of borders […]

Dan II; A Chronicle of the Excavations and the Late Bronze Age “Mycenaean” Tomb Avraham Biram and Rachel Ben-Dov (Jerusalem: Hebrew Union College, Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, 2002) 248 pp., $48 (available from the publisher, 13 King David St., Jerusalem 94101, Israel) Nearly 20 years ago, BAR published an interview with Avraham […]