074 “Overwhelming” is the only word to describe the 1994 Annual Meeting,a where 7,500 scholars attended more than 700 presentations. Imagine jumping into a huge wave high above your head, extending for miles along the shore on either side...

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...

064 “Treasures of the Holy Land,” the Israel Museum’s exhibition of nearly 200 outstanding pieces, is being shown at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 4, 1987. The exhibit is the largest and most important display of ancient...

030 I’ve known Bill Dever for a quarter century. I first met him when I knocked—unannounced—on the door of the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem in 1972. Bill, who directed the institute, answered and graciously invited...

024 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...

036 The monopoly over access to the Dead Sea Scrolls was broken in 1991. One of the key events in that breakup was the publication of Dead Sea Scroll texts that had been reconstructed by computer from a concordance. We will here detail this...

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...

078 Major developments in nearly every field related to the Dead Sea Scrolls have followed in the wake of their release. Research on the scrolls is burgeoning. Depositories of scroll photographs are doing their best to accommodate the needs of...

024 What is Biblical archaeology’s greatest achievement? What is Biblical archaeology’s greatest failure? What is Biblical archaeology’s greatest challenge? BAR asked a wide variety of scholars to answer these three questions. Their replies...

Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman claims to have found the world’s first prose masterpiece embedded in the Bible. This hidden book, he claims, opens with the Creation and ends with the death of David. Our two-part coverage begins with an article by BR editor Hershel Shanks, who details Friedman’s unconventional theory. In part two, Friedman’s book serves as a springboard for a spirited discussion among three leading scholars on how the Bible came to be.

052 Cyrus Gordon is a scholar of enormous range. His bibliography of more than 35 books and 350 articles is divided into over 20 categories, focusing largely on linguistics and social history. Among them are Aramaic-Syriac-Mandaic studies, art...

046 The following interview with Professor Giovanni Pettinato was conducted by BAR Editor Hershel Shanks on May 4, 1980. Professor Pettinato was the original epigrapher of the Italian Mission to Ebla. He resigned following a bitter personal and...

022 They are the first family of Israeli archeology. Trude and Moshe Dothan each have more than four decades of experience in the field, having excavated such major sites as Hazor, Hammath Tiberius, Nahariya, Deir el-Balah, Akko, Ashdid and Ekron...

034 A leading Egyptologist has recently suggested that the name of the Biblical king David may appear in a tenth-century B.C.E. Egyptian inscription. If correct, this mention of David dates a hundred years earlier than the mention of the “House...

040 041 AT DAWN THE TOMB OF JESUS WAS FOUND EMPTY. Later that very day two of the disciples, Cleopas and another unnamed, were walking on the road to Emmaus when Jesus appeared to them, but...

053 Ancient Jerusalem sometimes reveals itself in little bits. In this case, it is a tiny inscription with only six letters preserved. So little remains of ancient Israel in the City of David (the 12-acre...

058 After all, it had been fashioned by Moses himself a half millennium earlier—and for good purpose. In the Biblical passage that tells us what Hezekiah did, we learn of several other things the late-eighth century B.C.E. king destroyed: “He...

047 Did Solomon’s temple contain a seven-branched lampstand known as a menorah? Most people answer this question with an automatic “of course.” 048 But the Biblical text is not so clear. The...

058 Seldom does archaeology come face to face with people actually mentioned in the Bible. When that happens, the discovery takes on a unique immediacy, touched with awe. When a hoard of inscribed Hebrew bullae surfaced on the antiques market and...

022 Mystery, politics, Biblical implications, gold—a newly surfaced inscription purporting to be by King Jehoash has it all. And it may be a forgery! If authentic, it would be the first royal inscription ever found of an Israelite king. If...