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Displaying 1 - 20 of 25 results
Putting the Bible on the Map
An understanding of geography is essential to an understanding of many sections of the Bible. For this reason, an up-to-date atlas—maybe more than one—is a tool no serious student of the Bible can be without. There are at least four reasons why geography is important. First and perhaps most...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1983
Acting Like Apes
The Bible’s Alpha Males
A few weeks ago, my family went ape. Literally. Within the space of seven days, we visited the primate exhibits at the San Diego Zoo, watched an IMAX film about Jane Goodall, borrowed an educational video about apes from the library and...
Bible Review, June 2004
I: The Text Behind the Text of the Hebrew Bible
This is Part I of a two-part article; the second part will appear in the next issue of Bible Review. Part 2 will discuss the...
Bible Review, Summer 1985
Hittites in the Bible: What Does Archaeology Say?
People called Hittites are frequently mentioned in the Biblical account of Israelite history. In the past 100 years the archaeologist’s spade has unearthed Hittite civilization: It has proved to be both large and important. Does it accord,...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 1979
Exorcising Demons
Pazuzu...Lamashtu...Khatyu...Sheseru...Sasam...Lilith...Asmodeus...Beelzebub.... Names to conjure with. Literally. Years ago, when I was a student at Harvard, my teacher Frank Moore Cross raised a puzzling question: Why do demons—so prominent...
Bible Review, October 2004
Did Moses Have Horns?
Michelangelo’s monumental Moses immediately captures the attention of visitors to the church of St. Peter in Chains in Rome. The sculptor has created a vision not merely of the lawgiver, but of Israel’s God as conceived by pre-modern...
Bible Review, February 1988
Who Wrote Second Isaiah?
The Book of Isaiah contains the most astounding prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. Ostensibly, the Prophet Isaiah, who flourished in the eighth century B.C.E., according to Isaiah 1:1, accurately foresaw events that occurred a couple hundred years...
Bible Review, October 2003
The History of Israelite Religion
A Secular or Theological Subject?
If we propose to study the history of the religion of ancient Israel, we must be governed by the same postulates that are the basis of modern historical method. Our task must be a historical, not a theological, enterprise. We must trace the...
Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2005
II: Original Biblical Text Reconstructed from Newly Found Fragments
Scrolls provide a fresh understanding of apocalyptic elements in late biblical religion
In the last issue of Bible Review, Professor Cross presented a description, based on his study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, of how the text of the Hebrew Bible developed (“The Text...
Bible Review, Fall 1985
Bah, Humbug!
A scholar rips Handel’s Messiah
Every December, concert halls and churches throughout the English-speaking world resound with the strains of George Frederic Handel‘s mighty Messiah. For centuries, music lovers have gone home humming the arias and choruses that Handel‘s...
Bible Review, December 2002
The Dead Sea Scrolls: How They Changed My Life
In this issue four prominent scholars tell BAR readers how the scrolls changed their lives. Harvard’s Frank Cross is the doyen of Dead Sea Scroll scholars; his views come in an interview with BAR editor Hershel Shanks. In the pages that...
Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2007
BAR Excavation in Jerusalem Highlights Summer Seminar
Digs uncover exciting Byzantine and Israelite relics.
The following report was prepared by Jim (Yaakov) Fleming, BAR’s Jerusalem correspondent and Director of BAR’s Summer Seminar in Israel. The first BAR-sponsored excavations took place last summer—appropriately enough—in Jerusalem. Not only...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1979
Did Yahweh Have a Consort?
The new religious inscriptions from the Sinai
The book of Kings describes a time during the 9th–7th centuries B.C. when the land was divided into two kingdoms—Judah in the south and Israel in the north. Phoenicia and Israel were linked by commerce and royal marriages and Hebrew...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 1979
Is Psalm 45 an Erotic Poem?
You probably know the old joke about the psychiatrist who gave his patient a series of Rohrschach tests. The patient identified every single inkblot pattern as depicting a man and a woman copulating. The doctor then pronounced his official...
Bible Review, April 2004
Circumcision
The Private Sign of the Covenant
And God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your seed after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant ... every male of yours must be circumcised. When you circumcise your foreskin flesh, it will...
Bible Review, August 2004
Moses
From vigilante to lawgiver
Moses’ brief and violent encounter with the Egyptian taskmaster in Exodus reads like a crime report or movie script: Moses … went out to his brothers and saw their labors. He saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man, one of his brothers. He...
Bible Review, February 2003
Israelite Conquest or Settlement? New Light from Tell Masos
One of the most vexed problems of Biblical history and archaeology concerns the nature of the Israelite occupation of Canaan. With the occupation, Israel became a nation and at that time its national history begins. However, the Bible itself reflects at least two views of this beginning.
Biblical Archaeology Review, September 1976
The Historical Importance of the Samaria Papyri
When the Ta‘âmireh bedouin penetrated the Daliyeh cave (as described in the previous article by Paul Lapp) they found within more than 300 skeletons lying on or covered by mats. The bones were mixed with fragments of manuscripts...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March 1978
Joshua’s Altar—An Iron Age I Watchtower
I vividly remember a hot day in late October 1982—October 27, to be exact—when, with two other archaeologists, I first visited Adam Zertal’s excavation on Mt. Ebal. Even then, during the first season of excavation, rumors had spread that...
Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1986
Santa and His Asherah
The ancient Near Eastern roots of American Yuletide customs are manifold and fascinating. I will concentrate here on just two major points: that the Christmas tree was originally a symbol of the Canaanite goddess Asherah and that Santa Claus...
Bible Review, December 1998