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Displaying 1 - 20 of 23 results
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
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
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
“Eves” of Everyday Ancient Israel
Women are vastly underrepresented in the Hebrew Bible. Named men outnumber women by about ten to one. And the women who do appear are mostly exceptional or elite women, not the majority who were farm women. Not only are women underrepresented...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2014
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
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
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
The Many Masters of Dor, Part 2: How Bad Was Ahab?
Tel Dor, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, is the site of one of the most conquered cities in the Levant. Although practically...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 1993
Was There a Seven-Branched Lampstand in Solomon’s Temple?
Did Solomon’s temple contain a seven-branched lampstand known as a menorah? Most people answer this question with an automatic “of course.” But the Biblical text is not so clear. The...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 1979
Book Excerpt: The Shapira Affair
The late 1880’s in Jerusalem was an age of discovery. On the one hand, textual critics, anthropologists, geologists, and philosophers combined to pour scorn and derision on Scriptural traditions; on the other, archaeology was never so popular...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1979
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
Big City, Few People
Jerusalem in the Persian Period
I would like to take a somewhat radical, maximalist view of the size of Jerusalem when the Israelites (or, more precisely, the Judahites) returned from the Babylonian Exile and restored the city walls, as described in the Book of Nehemiah...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 2005
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
Buried Treasure: The Silver Hoard from Dor
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...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1998
Digging the Talmud in Ancient Meiron
The Talmud is, after the Bible itself, Judaism’s most significant and revered collection of sacred writings. Although the Talmud was in fact written and compiled between the Second and Fifth centuries A.D., rabbinic tradition holds that...
Biblical Archaeology Review, June 1978
What Happened to the Cult Figurines? Israelite Religion Purified After the Exile
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...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1989
Excavations at Tell Mevorakh Are Prelude to Tell Dor Dig
What a daughter site can tell us about its mother
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...
Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1979
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
Answers at Lachish
Sennacherib’s destruction of Lachish identified; dispute over a century’s difference in Israelite pottery dating resolved by new excavations; stamp impressions of Judean kings finally dated.
Lachish was one of the most important cities of the Biblical era in the Holy Land. The impressive mound, named Tel Lachish in Hebrew or Tell ed-Duweir in Arabic, is situated about 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem in the Judean hills. Once a...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1979