024 It is time to honor Jozef Milik. A former Polish priest now living in Paris, Milik is an original member of the small Dead Sea Scroll publication team designated in the early 1950s. Called by Time magazine “the fastest man with a...

059 Jerusalem will celebrate its 3,000th anniversary as the capital of Israel in 1996. The tri-millennium began with King David’s capture of the city from the Canaanite Jebusites, as recorded in the Bible (2 Samuel 5:6–9 and 1 Chronicles 11:4–8...

063 Can a reasonable case be made that this is King David’s tomb? Ask any ultra-modern, sophisticated archaeologist and he (or she) will most likely either express disinterest or brush off the possibility with a smile and an emphatic “No.”a Sit...

034 Talk about vision. I certainly had none when I started BAR. It began almost by accident, as an avocation. If I had any fixed notion, it was that it would be a magazine of ideas, not pictures. Excavations in Israel were full of stones, not...

074 “Overwhelming” is the only word to describe the 1994 Annual Meeting,a where 7,500 scholars attended more than 700 presentations. Imagine jumping into a huge wave high above your head, extending for miles along the shore on either side...

024 What is Biblical archaeology’s greatest achievement? What is Biblical archaeology’s greatest failure? What is Biblical archaeology’s greatest challenge? BAR asked a wide variety of scholars to answer these three questions. Their replies...

029 In 1966, the English scholar Derwas J. Chitty located 25 monasteries in the Judean desert east of Jerusalem, many known only from then-recent explorations.1 Today the number exceeds 60.2 The past decade has witnessed a veritable revolution in...

038 Four miles east of Jerusalem on a hilltop in the Judean desert on the road to Jericho sits Ma‘ale Adummim, a modern city of over 20 thousand people. In its midst is one of the largest, most important and most elaborate ancient monasteries in...

066 For more than 50 years, Dumbarton Oaks, the prestigious Byzantine study center in Washington, D.C. run by Harvard University, has held an annual conference of Byzantine scholars from all over the world. This year’s conference,a for the first...

024 024 This issue inaugurates our participation in the 3,000th anniversary celebration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The mayor of Jerusalem has officially proclaimed 1996 as the year...

030 031 Between 1968 and 1982 and from 1985 to the present, Israel’s Ministry of Religious Affairs has exposed over 900 feet of the western wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by digging a...

048 The name of the northern kingdom of Israel’s last king has turned up on a beautiful seal from the eighth century B.C.E.! Although the seal did not belong to the king himself, it was the property of one of his high-ranking ministers. The king...