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Displaying 1 - 20 of 58 results
Raider of the Lost Mountain—An Israeli Archaeologist Looks at the Most Recent Attempt to Locate Mt. Sinai
In an article entitled “Has Mt. Sinai Been Found?” BAR 11:04, Italian archaeologist and author of the popular, though now out-dated Palestine Before the Hebrews (New York: Knopf, 1963), Emmanuel Anati argues that he has found Mt. Sinai...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1988
Erasing History
The minimalist assault on ancient Israel
The recent discovery at Tel Dan of a ninth-century B.C.E. inscription—the first extra-biblical reference to the House of David—is causing extraordinary contortions among scholars who have maintained that the Bible’s history of the early...
Bible Review, December 1995
Early Israel: An Egalitarian Society
This is going to be a difficult article to illustrate, I thought to myself as I started to write this article for BAR. How do you illustrate something that isn’t there? This is an article about burials—or perhaps tombs would be more accurate...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 2013
How Did Israel Become a People?
The genesis of Israelite identity
It used to be easy to identify the earliest Israelites. They are referred to in a well-known hieroglyphic stele known as the Merneptah Stele or, sometimes, the Israel Stele. The Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, the son of Ramesses II, proclaims in...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2009
25 Years of Kicking Up Some Dust
“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...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2001
Turmoil at the Harvard Semitic Museum
Did Martin Peretz accuse director Stager of anti-Semitism? Is Peretz guilty of libel?
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...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 1994
Searching for Israelite Origins
The emergence of Israel in the hill country of Canaan poses some of the most intriguing questions now occupying archaeologists as well as Biblical scholars. The archaeological reflection of the “Israelite settlement”1 is dozens of hill-...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 1988
Did Eilat Mazar Find David’s Palace?
On some things, all agree: Hebrew University archaeologist Eilat Mazar is a careful, competent excavator who welcomes even her severest critics to her site. And, unlike many, she promptly publishes preliminary excavation reports, making...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2012
Radical Exodus Redating Fatally Flawed
In the September/October BAR, John Bimson and David Livingston wrote an article entitled “Redating the Exodus,” BAR 13:05, in which they radically revise a number of generally accepted dates and conclude that the Exodus occurred in the latter...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1987
In the Beginning: Religion at the Dawn of Civilization
Some call it Turkey’s Stonehenge. In fact, the circles of massive stones standing high on a hill are more than 5,000 years older than Britain’s famous megaliths. From Göbekli Tepe (“Potbelly Hill”) in southeastern Turkey, you can see 50 or...
Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 2013
The Southern Sinai Exodus Route in Ecological Perspective
Tradition locates quite precisely in southern Sinai a number of places associated with the Israelites’ history: the burning bush where Moses heard God’s call (Exodus 3:2–4), identified with a raspberry plant growing in the yard of St...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1985
Back to Megiddo
A new expedition will explore the jewel in the crown of Canaan/Israel
Tel Megiddo is widely regarded as the most important archaeological site in Israel from Biblical times, and as one of the most significant sites for the study of the ancient Near East...
Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1994
BAS Seminar Is Featured on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
Four participants in a Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) seminar on the Dead Sea Scrolls were interviewed in a MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour report this past spring. The four had attended a BAS seminar at Guilford College, in Greensboro, North...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 1993
The Short List: The New Testament Figures Known to History
The relatively plain ossuary (bone box) described in the preceding article by André Lemaire is doubly important to the study of early Christianity. It is the earliest archaeological artifact ever found that refers to Jesus; in fact, it is the...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2002
Ideology in Stone
Understanding the four-room house
During the late 1920s, an expedition by the Pacific School of Religion discovered three houses of strikingly similar design at Tell en-Nasbeh, Biblical Mizpah. When the first of these was unearthed in 1927, excavators thought it was a temple...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 2002
Did Ancient Jerusalem Draw Water Through Warren’s Shaft?
In 1867 the British engineer and explorer Charles Warren discovered a 52-foot vertical shaft, now called Warren’s Shaft in his honor, that for many scholars provided the key to unlocking the mystery of King David’s conquest of Jerusalem in...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2007
The Scrolls Are Here!
Library of Congress is first of three American venues
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...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1993
Purity and Impurity in Iron Age Israel
Purification practices of ancient Israelite society before the introduction of mikva’ot remain largely unexplored. Recent excavations at Tel ‘Eton, in the southeastern Shephelah, yielded rich data on household life and practices in the tenth through the eighth centuries B.C.E. A large four-room house at Tel ‘Eton offers a rare glimpse of how Iron Age Israelites coped with the issues of ritual impurity, and it enables the author to reconstruct the purification ritual.
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2019
Eyewitness Testimony
Parts of Exodus Written Within Living Memory of the Event
How old are the Bible’s narratives of the Exodus from Egypt? Can we really date the texts that preserve those narratives? And if so, what is the oldest Biblical text that discusses the Exodus? To start with the answer, we can date...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2003
Return to Aphek
“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...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2002