054 In a recent issue of BAR, archaeologists Gabriel Barkay and Amos Kloner described two magnificent burial caves from the First Temple period located just a few hundred yards north of Jerusalem’s old city (“Jerusalem Tombs From the Days of the...

049 Not whodunit but whoisit? The mystery deepens. I mean the mystery of the cemetery at Qumran with its 1,200 graves. Who was buried there? The conventional wisdom is that it was the Essenes. The reasoning goes like this: Sectarian manuscripts...

062 Shlomo Moussaieff of Herzliya, Israel, and London, England, who owned the world’s largest private collection of Near Eastern antiquities, surpassing that of many major museums, died in Israel on June 29, 2015, at the age of 92. To the...

003 On my last visit to Jerusalem, I stopped in to see Yigael Yadin—as I always do. It was a fascinating hour—as it always is. This time, he told me how he found what he believes to be a bamaa destroyed by King Josiah—and...

074 On January 29, 1935, during the third season of excavations at Tell ed-Duweir, a site thought to be Biblical Lachish, archaeologists discovered a collection of 18 ostraca, or inscribed potsherds. The ostraca had been covered by a thick layer...

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...

063 Can a reasonable case be made that this is King David’s tomb? Ask any ultra-modern, sophisticated archaeologist and he (or she) will most likely either express disinterest or brush off the possibility with a smile and an emphatic “No.”a Sit...

056 In 2001 or early 2002, we were asked, but declined, to publish an article about an unusual ancient oil lamp. The lamp has surfaced once again in the archaeological world. So I now describe it in the present tense: The lamp is unusual in...

031 Dangling on a rope ladder in a subterranean shaft, 30 feet below the City of David, the oldest part of Jerusalem, and 45 feet above the bottom of the shaft, I wondered whether I was being foolhardy. At 69, should I really be trying to re-...

053 I’m looking for a clever aphorism saying that good things sometimes come from something bad. I have in mind the Muslim Waqf’s illegal excavation on the Temple Mount to accommodate a new, larger entrance to the underground Marwani mosque...

Where is the original Pool of Siloam, the water pool that fed Jerusalem in the First Temple period? While the Roman-period Pool of Siloam—where Jesus cured the blind man—has recently been discovered, the earlier Pool of Siloam remains unknown. BAR’s editor investigates a possible location—another piece of the great Jerusalem water system puzzle.

079 BAR is entering its tenth year. For us—and we hope for our readers—this is indeed cause for celebration. We have, we believe, now demonstrated several things: 1. A widespread public is seriously interested in high-level scholarship in...

038 Query: Why is Disney World like Kansas City? Answer: Both proved hopelessly inept and inadequate in hosting the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR).a It will be a long time...

061 In 2011, more than 60 years after the first seven Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by the Bedouin in what became known as Qumran Cave 1, a splendid new edition of the Great Isaiah Scroll—1QIsaa, in more technical language—has been published...

040 The dispute which sporadically disrupted the archaeological excavations in the City of David last summer had nothing to do with archaeology and everything to do with politics. The incident demonstrated that Judaism, like other religions, has...

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...

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...

030 030 On October 23, 1999, Avraham Biran, director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, will celebrate his 90th birthday. He will also...

030 The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls changed many lives—arguably, including mine (as editor of BAR). As the cornerstone of our observance of the 60th anniversary of the scrolls’ discovery, eight leading Dead Sea Scroll scholars have agreed...

057 Background to Hanukkah A major new inscription that recently surfaced on the antiquities market and has been acquired by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem sheds dramatic new light on the run-up to the Maccabean revolt in the second century B.C.E...