024 The climate of the Near East has not changed since Biblical times, according to most scientists, a view shared by climatologists, as well as by geologists and dendrochronologists (experts in dating tree rings). Thus most plants in Bible lands...

020 For our ancestors, wild plants and animals of the Holy Land served as symbols and metaphors. These people were closer to nature than we are today and they understood the life cycles of the plants and animals about them. In the Bible, they...

058 The recent peace treaty between Egypt and Israel may have a historical precedent from almost 3000 years ago. Then too, these two nations wisely decided that peaceful co-existence was better than military confrontation. The peace accord in...

050 It is one of the fundamental commandments of the Torah (the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses). It is exemplary of Jewish morality, and it very early characterized the Christian faith as well. For 2,000 years, however, it has been...

018 019 018 Tel Dor, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, is the site of one of the most conquered cities in the Levant. Although practically...

024 025 For over 50 years now, a school of thought associated with the names of the great German scholars Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth has espoused a particular view of what is described in the...

021 The Bible imagines the religion of ancient Israel as purely monotheistic. And doubtless there were Israelites, particularly those associated with the Jerusalem Temple, who were strict monotheists. But the archaeological evidence (and the...

030 The Bible portrays the Philistines as Israel’s cruel and ruthless enemy. The two peoples engaged in a fierce struggle for control of the land in the 12th–11th centuries B.C.E. We all know the stories of Samson’s struggles against the...

050 The Hebrew word ya-el appears three times in the Bible. In English translations it is usually translated as “wild goat,” and in some modern translations, as “mountain-goat.” In actuality, the Hebrew ya-el is the ibex (Capra...

022 History runs deep at Tel Dor—45 feet deep to be exact! Layer upon layer of ancient cities, each built on the ruins of its predecessor, have formed this immense mound on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, about 12 miles south of Haifa. As...

062 Nothing in the archaeological record of Egypt directly substantiates the Biblical story of the Exodus. Yet a considerable body of Egyptian material provides such close analogies to the Biblical account that it may, in part, serve as indirect...

046 046 At first, our discovery—an unadorned clay jar—seemed deceptively modest. For months we had been excavating an area overlooking the southern harbor of ancient Dor, south of Haifa on...

045 The Assyrians and Babylonians both ravaged large parts of ancient Israel, yet the archaeological evidence from the aftermath of their respective conquests tells two very different stories. Why? In 721 B.C.E., the Assyrians brought an end to...

012 Five Biblical prophets—Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah—scathingly attacked the sacrificial cult practiced in the shrines of ancient Israel and Judah. These prophets all lived in that turbulent 150-year period that began with the death...

022 Accidental discoveries of two pits containing cult figurines have led me to discern an extraordinary development in Israelite religious observance. This development occurred when the Jews returned from the Babylonian Exile in the sixth to...

034 In 1980, the first spade will sink into Tell Dor. As previously announced in BAR (“Yigael Yadin to Head New Excavation,” BAR 04:04), I will direct the field work at the new excavation. In a sense, however, this excavation began several years...

With a commercial empire that lasted a millennium, the Phoenicians were major players in the ancient Mediterranean world. Spreading their culture and goods, they came into contact with many different groups, but their relationship with the Israelites was distinct. Join Ephraim Stern as he explores the Phoenicians’ identity and interactions with their close neighbor and ally, Israel.

034 Rarely do Biblical texts and extra-Biblical materials supplement one another so well as those that describe the last two decades before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, which marked the end of the Judahite state in 586 B.C.E. As a...