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Displaying 1 - 20 of 51 results
Politics—Not Religious Law—Rules Ultra-Orthodox Demonstrators
Political power, not religious law, motivates the ultra-Orthodox in Israel who violently protest archaeological excavations, claiming that ancient Jewish graves are being desecrated. Jewish religious law (halakhah) does not prohibit...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1997
Relics in Rubble: The Temple Mount Sifting Project
Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is one of the world’s holiest sites; archaeological excavations are prohibited here. But, in November 1999, the Islamic trust that controls the Islamic structures on the site bulldozed a massive area in the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount and dumped the excavated debris into the Kidron Valley. Two archaeologists are running a pioneering project to wet-sift this debris to search for Temple Mount artifacts that have been concealed for centuries.
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2016
Was King Saul Impaled on the Wall of Beth Shean?
The Bible tells us that King Saul was killed by the Philistines and that his body (as well as those of his three sons) was hung on the wall of Beth Shean: “The Philistines came to strip the slain, and they found Saul and his three sons lying...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2012
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
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
Royal Palace, Royal Portrait?
The Tantalizing Possibilities of Ramat Raḥel
The first Judahite royal palace ever exposed in an archaeological excavation is bei ng rediscovered. And with this renewed interest come echoes of what is probably one of the bitterest rivalries in the history of Israeli ar chaeology—between...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2006
The Garden Tomb: Was Jesus Buried Here?
First-time visitors to Jerusalem are often surprised to learn that two very different sites vie for recognition as the burial place of Jesus. One is, as its name implies, the Holy Sepulchre Church; it is located in a crowded area of the...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 1986
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
Finding Historical Memories in the Patriarchal Narratives
The search for the historical patriarchs of Genesis has taken some dizzying turns in the last half-century. From the 1940s through the 1960s, scholars proclaimed that the patriarchal...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1995
What’s an Egyptian Temple Doing in Jerusalem?
Recent attacks on the historicity of the United Monarchy of David and Solomon (in the tenth century B.C.) have focused on the scant archaeological remains that have been discovered in...
Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2000
Mounds of Mystery
Where the Kings of Judah Were Lamented
At the beginning of the 20th century, when Jerusalem, still centered around its ancient core, was surrounded by agricultural land and orchards, 20 mysterious earth-and-stone mounds rose above the city’s western horizon, clearly visible from...
Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2003
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
Will Tel Rehov Save the United Monarchy?
In the shadow of Mt. Gilboa in the northern Jordan Valley stands one of Israel’s largest, most important archaeological sites—and, until recently, one of the least known. Yet there is...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2000
Excavating in Samson Country—Philistines and Israelites at Tel Batash
The period from the time of the Judges to the end of the Israelite monarchy is known in archaeological terms as the Iron Age. It is subdivided into Iron I, the time of the Judges from about 1200 to 1000 B.C., and Iron II, the United and...
Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1989
Jerusalem Tombs from the Days of the First Temple
A few hundred yards from Damascus Gate and over the wall from the Garden Tomb, magnificent burial cave lies beneath a Dominican monastery.
Damascus Gate, the most important entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City, fairly bustles with activity inside and out. Arab men in their robes and keffiyehs; Arab women in long embroidered...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 1986
Bronze Bull Found in Israelite “High Place” from the Time of the Judges
When he found it, Ofer Broshi was on army duty. Army life can be exhausting or boring—or sometimes both. At that moment, Broshi, a rugged young kibbutznik, was more bored than tired. He was resting on the summit of a hill in northern Samaria...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 1983
Pottery Talks
What Ceramics Tell Us About the Social World of Ancient Israel
So often it seems that pottery is boring. But the little bits of sherds that are ubiquitous on excavations tell us a lot. Thanks to pottery we can date structures such as buildings and...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2004
Burial Headrest as a Return to the Womb—A Reevaluation
In “The Peculiar Headrests for the Dead in First Temple Times,” BAR 13:04, Professor Othmar Keel takes issue with an earlier BAR article in which Amos Kloner and I discussed these stone headrests carved on top of burial benches (“Jerusalem...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 1988