048 048 Intense scholarly disagreements are common in archaeology. Cases of deliberate lying, however, are rare. Is this such a case? If so, what is the motive? When I returned from the Annual...

055 This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most famous letters in the history of Biblical scholarship: University Library, Cambridge May 13, 1896 Dear Mrs. Lewis, I think we have reason to congratulate ourselves. For the fragment I...

The Biblical Archaeology Society is establishing a “Scholars Exchange” for “Work In Progress” relating to the Dead Sea Scrolls. If it proves useful, we will consider expanding it to other areas of Biblical studies. Here’s how it works: 1. Any scholar may send us a topic on which he/she is working...

070 This year is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of William Foxwell Albright, this century’s greatest biblical archaeologist. To mark the occasion, a scholarly conference was held at the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, where...

036 A cow’s foreleg with six holes was illustrated in color in “Digging in the City of David,” BAR 05:04. Archaeologists identified the perforated bone as a flute; by blowing into the hollow bone and covering different holes, different notes...

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...

072 The Dead Sea Scrolls—Forty Years of Research Edited by Devorah Dimant and Uriel Rappaport (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992) 370 pp., 180 Dutch guilders ($102....

014 At the very end of Martin Scorsese’s film version of Nikos Kazantzakis’s now famous novel. The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus returns to the Cross, from his out-of-body temptation sequence, to those last, agonizing moments of death...

More than two centuries ago, it occurred to a few European intellectuals that Jesus as a figure of history may have been quite different from Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels. With the awareness of that potential difference, the scholarly quest for the Jesus of history began. At that time and in...

064 Mistakes in scholarship are inevitable. When they occur, they can lead other scholars into further error. One error begets another. I recently read a fascinating article, by a young graduate student at Hebrew University named Yosef Garfinkel...

066 Scholars attending a Dead Sea Scroll conference at the University of Eichstaett in Germany recently addressed a letter to the Israel Antiquities Authority calling for a renewed investigation of Qumran Cave 7, where several fragmentary Greek...

002 How quickly should ancient texts be published after they come into a scholar’s hands? Within one year—at most, says Professor David Noel Freedman in a forthcoming issue of the Biblical Archaeologist. This is a statement of...

044 Three great intellectual revolutions of the 19th and early 20th centuries have profoundly shaped and transformed the way we think of ourselves and our world. The first is Marxism and its derivative, socialism. The dissolution of the Soviet...

066 The forger has struck again—this time he managed to fool some of the world’s foremost scholars. Although at least some of his forgeries have now been discovered, the forger himself remains at large. And the problem of archaeological forgeries...

052 A barracks or a bazaar? Could it be a temple? Or maybe a stable? Perhaps a storehouse? These are some of the suggestions regarding the function of a very important type of building that appears at one Israelite site after another for nearly...

043 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...