Your Filters
- (-) Remove Solomon filter Solomon
- (-) Remove Authors: Leen Ritmeyer filter Authors: Leen Ritmeyer
- (-) Remove Authors: Richard Elliott Friedman filter Authors: Richard Elliott Friedman
- (-) Remove Authors: Lawrence E. Stager filter Authors: Lawrence E. Stager
- (-) Remove Authors: Ronald S. Hendel filter Authors: Ronald S. Hendel
- (-) Remove Authors: William H.C. Propp filter Authors: William H.C. Propp
Displaying 1 - 20 of 34 results
The Ark of the Covenant: Where It Stood in Solomon’s Temple
Four years ago, I wrote an article for BAR in which I identified the original 500-cubit-square Temple Mount.1 By now, this location is well established in the archaeological world,...
Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1996
Jerusalem as Eden
For ancient Israel, the Temple of Solomon—indeed, the Temple Mount and all Jerusalem—was a symbol as well as a reality, a mythopoeic realization of heaven on earth, Paradise, the Garden of Eden. After King David’s conquest of Jerusalem, the...
Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2000
Acting Like Apes
The Bible’s Alpha Males
A few weeks ago, my family went ape. Literally. Within the space of seven days, we visited the primate exhibits at the San Diego Zoo, watched an IMAX film about Jane Goodall, borrowed an educational video about apes from the library and...
Bible Review, June 2004
Ritmeyer Responds to Jacobson
David Jacobson’s theory regarding the shape of Herod’s Temple Mount and the placement of the Temple within it draws heavily on Roman architectural practice. The Romans were particularly fond of symmetrical structures, as Jacobson rightly...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2000
Exorcising Demons
Pazuzu...Lamashtu...Khatyu...Sheseru...Sasam...Lilith...Asmodeus...Beelzebub.... Names to conjure with. Literally. Years ago, when I was a student at Harvard, my teacher Frank Moore Cross raised a puzzling question: Why do demons—so prominent...
Bible Review, October 2004
Reconstructing Herod’s Temple Mount in Jerusalem
Herod the Great—master builder! Despite his crimes and excesses, no one can doubt his prowess as a builder. One of his most imposing achievements was in Jerusalem. To feed his passion for grandeur, to immortalize his name and to attempt to...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1989
Locating the Original Temple Mount
Somewhere on Jerusalem’s majestic Temple Mount—the largest man-made platform in the ancient world, the size of 24 football fields, nearly 145 acres—Herod the Great (37–4 B.C.) built a...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 1992
Is Everybody a Bible Expert?
Not the authors of the Book of J
It is a strange fact that we biblical scholars always seem to meet people who are surprised that we really know things about the Bible. They assume that the study of the Bible is a matter of opinions and interpretations, with few...
Bible Review, April 1991
Santa and His Asherah
The ancient Near Eastern roots of American Yuletide customs are manifold and fascinating. I will concentrate here on just two major points: that the Christmas tree was originally a symbol of the Canaanite goddess Asherah and that Santa Claus...
Bible Review, December 1998
Taking the Biblical Text Apart
For centuries, scholars from many backgrounds—religious and nonreligious, Christian and Jewish—have worked on discovering how the Bible came to be. Their task was not to prove whether the Bible’s words were divinely revealed to the authors...
Bible Review, Fall 2005
Reconstructing the Triple Gate
Reconstructing the Triple Gate required that we answer three principal questions. What was the gate’s original width? Was it originally a double gate or a triple gate? For whom was it built? The discovery of a vault in front of the Triple...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1989
Finding Historical Memories in the Patriarchal Narratives
The search for the historical patriarchs of Genesis has taken some dizzying turns in the last half-century. From the 1940s through the 1960s, scholars proclaimed that the patriarchal...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1995
Of Fathers, Kings and the Deity
The nested households of ancient Israel
Ancient Israelite society was structured in a way that few of us in modern times experience. Its focus was on family and kin...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2002
The Kitchen Debate
Three Scholars Discuss a Major New Book on History and the Bible
When we received a copy of Kenneth A. Kitchen’s new book, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, we knew that we should review it. Kitchen is one of the world’s leading scholars (he specializes in Egyptology), and the subject matter of the book—how historically accurate is the Bible?—is of central interest to many of our readers. We asked Ronald Hendel, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a columnist for our sister magazine, Bible Review, to review it for us.
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 2005
Who Wrote Second Isaiah?
The Book of Isaiah contains the most astounding prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. Ostensibly, the Prophet Isaiah, who flourished in the eighth century B.C.E., according to Isaiah 1:1, accurately foresaw events that occurred a couple hundred years...
Bible Review, October 2003
Is Psalm 45 an Erotic Poem?
You probably know the old joke about the psychiatrist who gave his patient a series of Rohrschach tests. The patient identified every single inkblot pattern as depicting a man and a woman copulating. The doctor then pronounced his official...
Bible Review, April 2004
The Fury of Babylon: Ashkelon and the Archaeology of Destruction
In 586 B.C.E. Nebuchadrezzar (also known as Nebuchadnezzar II), king of Babylon, attacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple and burned the city. This of course is the focal point of the Biblical story. For Nebuchadrezzar, however, Jerusalem was...
Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1996
The Shechem Temple
Where Abimelech Massacred a Thousand
In the time of Abimelech, a powerful warrior in early Israel, great events occurred in a fortified temple in Shechem. I believe that temple was found in an excavation at Shechem more...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 2003
When Canaanites and Philistines Ruled Ashkelon
Ashkelon. The summer of 1990. The sixth season of the Leon Levy Expedition, sponsored by the Harvard Semitic Museum. In the waning days of the season, on the outskirts of the Canaanite...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 1991
Biblical Views: Farewell to SBL
Faith and Reason in Biblical Studies
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 2010