024 As work begins on the infrastructure required to relocate the Israeli army’s bases and training facilities from Sinai to the Negev—in accordance with the Middle East peace agreements—Israel’s archaeological institutions have been mobilized to...

046 “Biblical minimalism,” as it is known, has gone through a number of permutations in the recent past. Its modern career began about 30 years ago, when BAR was still a youngster. Since then it has been part of the ongoing debate regarding the...

019 One of the most critical battles in early Israelite history was fought about 1050 B.C. between the Israelites and the Philistines. At that time, the Bible tells us, the twelve tribes had settled the land and the Ark of the Covenant had been...

070 Walk into the Madison Building of the Library of Congress (LC), turn left just inside the entrance, and you can gaze at what less than two years ago only a small handful of scholars were allowed to see: a dozen Dead Sea Scroll fragments from...

044 BAR readers, as well as scholars, have long puzzled over the distinctive tripartite pillared buildings that have been discovered in so many excavations in Israel. Their architecture seems simple enough: long rectangular buildings divided into...

035 The Bible tells us that the doors of the inner shrine of Solomon’s Temple had five mezuzot (singular mezuzah) (1 Kings 6:31). Whatever they were, the Bible is not referring to the little parchment texts in a case posted on the...

Excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa have uncovered a second city gate from the 10th century B.C.E., the time of King David’s reign. No other site from this period has more than one gate. What do Qeiyafa’s two city gates tell us about the Kingdom of Judah in David’s time?

030 031 Not without some justification did Absalom arrange the murder of his half-brother Amnon. Amnon had raped Absalom’s sister Tamar. Nonetheless, fratricide among King David’s sons was not...

046 “It feels good to be back,” says David Ussishkin as we approach the impressive mound of Lachish, a major military outpost of the Judahite kingdom that fell to a massive Assyrian onslaught in 701 B.C. The Assyrian king Sennacherib celebrated...

050 050 051 “Do you see those pottery sherds?” asks 92-year-old Avraham Biran as he points with his cane to the sun-baked earth of Aroer, an...

Archaeologists have uncovered male figurines from sites in ancient Judah. Could these represent the Israelite God, Yahweh?

052 053 “You can count the centuries as we go down the stairs. We’re going from the 16th century A.D. to the 13th century B.C.,” says excavator Moshe Kochavi as he leads me to some steps inside...

026 “We shun controversy,” BAR editor Hershel Shanks likes to tell visitors to our offices. Yeah, right. BAR was not founded as a muckraking publication, but in our day we’ve had our share of causes, controversies, battles—even an international...

016 017 Prepare to fall in love—with our friends the Yarmukians. Since they lived almost 8,000 years ago, about 3,000 years before people began communicating in writing, you can’t ask them who...

064 The entire staff of the Harvard Semitic Museum—home of one of this country’s most important archaeological collections—has been dismissed, leading to a rancorous contretemps concerning the institution’s leadership and its future direction...

023 At a site called Izbet Sartah, now believed by some scholars, to be Biblical Ebenezer, a recent excavation by Tel Aviv and Bar-Ilan Universities has uncovered a small clay potsherd—unrelated to the Biblical story—which, however,...

How was the first woman created in Genesis 2? Was she made from the man’s rib or, as recently suggested in BAR, from his os baculum (penis bone)?

044 The current heated debate on the relationship between history, the Bible and archaeology focuses on the tenth century B.C.E., the time of David and Solomon. In the early years of research, the Biblical narratives of David, Solomon and his son...