042 The crossing of the Red Sea in which the Egyptians drowned was an actual historical event that occurred in 1477 B.C. The miraculous episode took place in the coastal plain south of Lake Menzaleh, west of what is now the Suez Canal. The...

031 “It may well be that I have done no more than weave, in the words of George Eliot, ‘an ingenious web of probabilities—the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.’1 Perhaps final truth in archaeology is unattainable,...

Kadesh-Barnea, Tell el-Qudeirat, hasn’t been excavated since the 1980s, but a new pottery analysis indicates a settlement was there at the time of the Exodus.

012 For a week in April, all Jerusalem was aglitter with archaeology. The occasion was the International Congress on Biblical Archaeology marking the 70th anniversary of the Israel Exploration Society. At the opening session, the Acting President...

048 The Washington Journalism Review, supposedly a monitor of media fairness and accuracy, has falsely and irresponsibly accused Professor Hans Goedicke of The Johns Hopkins University of attempting to pull off an academic fraud.a In the...

018 018 For several years, we at the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) have been organizing sessions at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Our sessions have been...

063 More than 40 years after re-excavating Tel Gezer’s dramatic “High Place,” archaeologist William Dever has now published his final excavation report. It is indeed welcome. The High Place consists of ten monumental standing stones, some more...

059 Longtime BAR readers are familiar with the Merneptah Stele, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which is generally recognized as containing the oldest extrabiblical reference to Israel.a The hieroglyphic inscription can be dated quite...

054 William G. Dever, the world’s leading academic opponent of the term “Biblical archaeology,” has now declared the age of the “New Biblical Archaeology”—and his support of it. Dever, the excavator of the Solomonic gate at Biblical Gezer, former...

028 028 028 Hershel Shanks: I have known each of you for many years. And I know that the Bible has been a central influence in your lives—...

044 What may be an ancient Israelite house has been discovered at the one-time Egyptian capital of Thebes, dating to about the same time the Israelites were settling in Canaan (Iron Age I; 1200–1000 B.C.E.). The house was found by the Austrian...

036 037 I didn’t realize how big Denver is. I learned when trying to cover three (or four) meetings at the same time last November in two locations in downtown Denver and nearby Boulder...

035 On Sunday, January 16, I interviewed Zahi Hawass in his office in Zamalek, the elegant Cairene island in the Nile and home of the Gezira Sports Club, from which Hawass commanded an army of 32,000 employees as secretary general of the Supreme...

064 We all condemn looting. But there is little talk about what can effectively be done about it. Telling people not to buy what may be looted antiquities makes the authorities feel good but has virtually no effect on looting. In the September...

055 Although he is not an archaeologist, Canadian/Israeli TV journalist and producer Simcha Jacobovici (pronounced Yacobovitch) has made some remarkable archaeological discoveries. For example, the first plague: When pharaoh refused to let the...

Are so-called four-room houses an infallible sign of Israelites’ presence just because many have been found at sites identified as Israelite? If you think they are, how do you avoid the pitfall of circular argumentation, which is implied in this reasoning? Hershel Shanks argues that we might need to look for other historical evidence before we draw conclusions of ethnicity from the floor plans of early Iron Age houses in Biblical lands.

058 Hershel Shanks: Père Benoit, you are in a consummate way representative of the French in Jerusalem, or of the scholarly world of France in Jerusalem. Most people in the United States are not aware that so many different nationalities have...

026 Two silver anniversaries were celebrated at the Annual Meetinga in Anaheim last November. The first was the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of the Anchor Bible series, celebrated with a dinner honoring editor David...

040 A deep fissure runs through Biblical studies today. On one side are those who maintain that the Bible contains much reliable history; on the other side are those who say the Biblical texts were written much later than the events they describe...

030 031 For Gezer there is still time. But not much. The stones are still there, but gradually the walls are deteriorating. Soon they may tumble under the assault of winter rains and summer...