038 The scholarly world is abuzz. During at least the past 20 years, and more likely during the last 33 years, more than a thousand potsherds inscribed in Aramaic have come onto the antiquities market. About 800 of these have now been published.1...

024 BAR recently published a fascinating article by Gabriel Barkay reporting on his excavation of a small rolled silver amulet, dating from the seventh or sixth century B.C. When the amulet was unrolled, it was found to contain the tetragrammaton...

057 Israel not only survived but thrived in exile. Indeed, Israelite Yahwisma became universal monotheism in the Babylonian Exile. In the preceding article, Professor Seymour Gitin explains why the Philistines, unlike the Israelites, did not...

055 Southern Arabia is 1,200 miles south of Israel. Naturally, skepticism about the reality of trade between South Arabia and Israel in ancient times seems justified. Yet the Bible documents this trade quite extensively—most famously in the...

050 050 The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) recently formed a committee to decide whether the James ossuary inscription and the Yehoash (or Jehoash) inscription are authentic or forgeries. I...

028 Like many peoples mentioned in the Bible but otherwise almost unknown, the Edomites are coming to life through the wonders of archaeology. Ironically, however, some of the most dramatic finds are being excavated in Israel rather than in the...

047 The dating of the Siloam Inscription proposed by Rogerson and Davies would not only change the interpretation of one of the most famous monuments of ancient Jerusalem. It would also change the dating of other Hebrew inscriptions of the First...

024 “I laid waste the large district of Judah and made the overbearing and proud Hezekiah, its king, bow in submission,” boasts Sennacherib, monarch of Assyria, in a preserved cuneiform inscription.1 “I laid siege to 46 of his strong cities: .....

027 028 We were driving south, along the Gulf of Suez, heading for our excavation site when our jeep broke down. Fortunately, it happened on a paved road, before we turned onto the desert track...

028 029 Winter is sometimes the best time to dig in Israel’s Negev desert—and sometimes the worst. In summer the heat can be stifling; while in winter, cold windy days at times prevent any...

022 Three recent books deal with the life of Moses and that epoch-making journey we call the Exodus. Although each is different from the other two, a reading of all three impresses one with how little, not how much, we really know. Two of these...

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...

050 F. A. Klein was an Anglican minister, born in Alsace, who came to the Holy Land as a medical missionary in the mid-1800s. Although he lived in Jerusalem, he traveled widely on both sides of the Jordan, seeking to relieve pain and win converts...

034 035 This is part III of a three-part article. Part II appeared in the last issue (“Why Were Hundreds of Dogs Buried at Ashkelon?” BAR 17:03). Throughout most of its 5,000-year history,...

030 031 “Tophet” is a Biblical word. It is the name of a place that was on the south side of ancient Jerusalem in the Valley of Ben-Hinnom, where the Israelites sacrificed their children by...

064 One of the greatest Biblical archaeologists of the 20th century, William Foxwell Albright, left an unfinished book manuscript when he died in 1971. But this is no secret to his friends, students and admirers. BAR readers were told of the...

048 The name of the northern kingdom of Israel’s last king has turned up on a beautiful seal from the eighth century B.C.E.! Although the seal did not belong to the king himself, it was the property of one of his high-ranking ministers. The king...

053 When Oded Golan first invited me to his home in April 2002, it was to examine an inscription on a bone box—but not the one bearing the now-famous inscription, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” That one was not even in Golan’s...

024 Amazing as it may sound, a limestone bone box (called an “ossuary”) has surfaced in Israel that may once have contained the bones of James, the brother of Jesus. We know this because an extraordinary inscription incised on one side of the...

042 New inscriptions from two different sites have reopened the debate about the meaning of asherah, a term often used in the Bible. Is it—or she—a goddess? Is it a holy place? Or perhaps a sacred tree? Or a pole? Or possibly a grove of trees?...