032 An increasingly modish—virulent?—strain of biblical scholarship concludes that the Bible is useless for reconstructing the history of ancient Israel. If this history can be reconstructed at all, it must be based solely on archaeological...

028 029 Two extremely important Hebrew inscriptions have recently surfaced on the antiquities market. One appears to be a receipt for a donation of three silver shekels to the Temple of Yahweh...

032033 The Bible reflects an intimate knowledge of herbs and spices, which perfumed the Jerusalem Temple (2 Chronicles 2:4), sweetened the home (Song of Songs 7:13) and seasoned meals during...

052 The port of ancient Gaza has been found. A joint Palestinian-French expedition is conducting the first scientific archaeological excavation since the Palestinian Authority took charge of the city. They have found remains of the port in at...

063 There, on a moonlit night beside the ruins of Qumran, was the voice of Yigael Yadin, Israel’s most illustrious archaeologist, dead these 13 years, reading in the original language from a letter by Shimon bar Kosiba, better known as Bar-Kokhba...

054 I suppose I should have known it would happen someday. Perhaps the next thing will be a Ph.D. dissertation analyzing the “BAR phenomenon.” The scholarly community sometimes can’t quite understand us—so it tries to explain us. Absent a full-...

026 One of the most controversial issues in modern Biblical studies is the increasingly assertive contention that the Bible is essentially useless as a historical source, even for the period of the Israelite united monarchy (tenth century B.C.E...

046 046 Unlike the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–70 C.E.), which was chronicled in detail by the first-century historian Josephus, the Second Jewish Revolt, the so-called Bar-Kokhba...