012013 012 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...

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...

039 Research in the land of the Bible has suffered a heavy loss in the untimely death of Yohanan Aharoni, chairman of the Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. To his associates he has bequeathed the task of continuing and summarizing...

051 It is time to clarify for BAR readers the widely discussed relationship between the habiru, who are well documented in Egyptian and Near Eastern inscriptions, and the Hebrews of the Bible. There is absolutely no relationship! The first...

045 Before they settled in the hill country of Canaan, where did the earliest Israelites come from and what was the nature of their society? The Bible is very clear. They were pastoral nomads who came from east of the Jordan. Much of the...

036 037 036 Over 20 years ago, I was excavating a room on the south side of the Israelite fortress at Arad—it was the 1964 season—when...

042 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...

038 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...

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...

054 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...

026027 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...

042 042 Not long ago, a clay impression of the seal of a Hebrew king came to light for the first time: The seal of ’Ahaz, king of Judah from about 734 to 715 B.C.E., had been pressed into a...

013 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...

036 037 Of the recurring, often bizarre attempts to find ancient Semitic inscriptions in the western hemisphere, the most prominent and frequently cited concerns the so-called Paraiba...

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...

016 017 The Israelite fortress at Arad is unique in the Land of Israel. It’s the only site excavated with modern archaeological methods that contains a continuous archaeological record from the...

025 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...

027 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...

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...

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...