Ancient Israel

In this film from the Biblical Archaeology Society, Hershel Shanks visits Nazareth, Galilee, Capernaum, Bethsaida, Qumran, Sepphoris and Jerusalem to view sites where Jesus walked. Along the way, Shanks meets with the world’s most prominent archaeologists and Biblical scholars to discuss the archaeological discoveries that link these sites to Jesus. Their lively, in-depth conversations offer […]

This lecture will examine the Exodus narrative (Exod 1–2, 13–14) as a historical report and examine to what extent historical and archaeological data support its historicity. We will explore offhanded references in the text may seem irrelevant to the narrative but that can be of major importance to its interpretation.

Nowhere in the Bible is there an explicit explanation of why the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt (Exodus 1–2). This lecture, based on ideas developed by Yair Zakovitch, will suggest that implicit reasons are provided in Genesis.

Psalms and prayer are usually thought of in vertical terms: people calling to God and above, with the hope that God hears and heeds them. But prayer was also, in Biblical times, fundamentally a community ritual. This talk will thus examine how psalms from the Second Temple served to create communities and sub-communities. It will […]

Why does Israel’s greatest king and future messiah have a foreign ancestress? Does the Book of Ruth have anything to do with the question of foreign wives in the period of Ezra and Nehemiah, or is the text really from the time of the Judges? How does the literary structure of the Book of Ruth […]

In this opening lecture will consider not only How the Bible came to be, but also the different ideas people hold about the Bible, what constitutes an important book and how these lists (the canon) came to be. This was part of the Telling Biblical Tales DVD.

In B.C.E Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, invaded Judah and brought to an end the revolt against Assyria led by Hezekiah, the king of Judah. Sennacherib turned first to Lachish, conquered and destroyed it, and from there he sent an expeditionary force to Jerusalem. Jerusalem was not attacked, and Hezekiah surrendered and became an […]