025 Jerusalem is probably the most excavated city in the world. And few cities hold such fascination for the public as well as for the scholar. What was the city like when the Israelites entered Canaan? (Apparently it was strong enough to resist...

042 The impulse to engage with the Bible is, at its roots, a religious—that is to say, a theological—one. So it has been for thousands of years, for both Jews and Christians. This changed, in the 18th century, with what we call the Enlightenment...

026 Did a man named Homer really live? And are the poems attributed to him, the Iliad and the Odyssey, rooted in actual history? Generations of scholars have wrestled with these problems and provided widely different solutions...

022 023 According to Leo the Deacon, a tenth-century Byzantine historian, the inhabitants of the Anatolian province of Cappadocia were troglodytes: “They went underground in holes, clefts, and...

030 Masada—the very name resonates with images of bravery and freedom. In this imposing desert fortress, a greatly outnumbered band of fighters, unwilling to concede defeat during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, held out for more than three...

054 The Bible is the fault line that divides a significant segment of the scholarly world. It is the attitude toward the Bible that underlies the disparate battles, both institutional and substantive, that are being fought as I write. The...

024 025 Enigmatic references to unknown books are scattered throughout the Bible. We read of the Book of Jashar and the Book of the Wars of Yahweh, but we cannot read the books themselves, for...

036 In the centuries before Israel emerged in the highlands of Canaan, first as a people and then as a nation, the region was essentially ruled by Egypt. But how are we to understand this hegemony? Until a little more than a century ago, about...

028 029 The scene has stimulated the imagination of great painters. The light of a full moon accentuates the shadows in a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives. A lonely figure prays in...

040 Bible scholars, as BR readers know all too well, spend a lot of time quibbling over what the Bible says. Many of the disagreements arise because we do not have a single original text to work from. For the New Testament, the earliest...

040 040 This is the story of how the puzzling inscriptions on some ancient oil lamps illuminate an entire era. These modest artifacts offer us a vivid picture of the spiritual life of the...

036 Paul: A Critical Life Jerome Murphy-O’Connor (New York and Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) xv1 + 416 pp., $35 Paul: The Mind of the Apostle...

014 015 King Agamemnon rose to his feet: “Friends, Zeus vowed to me long ago that I should never embark for home till I had brought the walls of Ilium crashing down.”...

026 At the risk of shocking my reader, I feel compelled to reveal my sympathy for a character that the Bible seems to treat rather badly. I am talking about Esau, the elder brother of Jacob. I feel sorry for him. I imagine him alone, always alone...

048 Between 734 and 732 B.C.E., the Assyrian monarch Tiglath-pileser III campaigned to the west, from the Assyrian capital at Nineveh, cutting a swath into the northern kingdom of Israel as well as the southern kingdom of Judah. We know this from...

042 With unqualified certainty, Margreet Steiner asserts that in the Late Bronze Age (1550–1150 B.C.E.), the period just before the Israelite settlement, there was “no … town, let alone a city” of Jerusalem. As far as the archaeological record is...

032 If we look at Paul’s letters, it is not difficult to pull out what on the surface appear to be directly opposing views, anti- and pro-Israel: I. Anti-Israel: • “All who rely on works of the law are under a curse” (Galatians 3:10). • “No one...

020 021 Do you wonder what happened to the ancient Etruscans, those civilized, seemingly mysterious people who revealed so many secrets of life and death to the Romans? Simply journey to the...

042 Can a folktale from the Middle Bronze Age provide us with information about the remote past that has eluded even extensive archaeological expeditions? The answer is yes. The Tale of Sinuhe,1 composed during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, may help...

041 It was the end of 1842, and Julia Smith expected the end of the world. A believer in the apocalyptic prophecies of the Baptist preacher William Miller, Smith had allowed the plants in the conservatory of her Connecticut home to go unwatered...