Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 2011
Displaying 1 - 20 of 22 results
Solving the Problem of the Fourth Plague
Blood, frogs, lice, cattle disease, boils … Every spring at the Jewish holiday of Passover, the ten nasties that plagued Egypt are described in the Haggadah, the midrashic retelling of the Exodus from Egypt that is read aloud during the...
Bible Review, April 2003
The oldest Torah manuscripts survive incomplete and barely legible. But not the scroll sheet acquired recently by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Penned more than a millennium ago, this uniquely preserved parchment represents the oldest complete Torah scroll sheet totally legible by the naked eye. Explore the manuscript’s history and what makes it such a remarkable artifact.
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2019
An archaeological myth destroyed
One of the oldest prohibitions in the entire Bible is the injunction against boiling a kid in the milk of its mother. It is repeated three times in identical words: “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”a From these words, the...
Bible Review, Fall 1985
The Bible tells us that King Saul was killed by the Philistines and that his body (as well as those of his three sons) was hung on the wall of Beth Shean: “The Philistines came to strip the slain, and they found Saul and his three sons lying...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2012
How we know the Torah was written in the tenth century B.C.E.
For the last two hundred years, a central question in biblical studies has been the authorship of the Torah (or Pentateuch). The Age of Enlightenment led scholars to realize that the traditional Jewish and Christian belief in Moses’...
Bible Review, February 2001
Rank, authority and holiness were expressed in antiquity by fringes on garments
In the book of Numbers, the Lord speaks to the Israelites through his servant Moses and commands them to wear tassels (or tsitsit) on the corners of their garments. The tassels must include a blue thread. The Biblical passage reads as...
Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1983
Women as Israel
Open your Bible at random and you will notice something striking: Female characters abound. And it’s not simply a lot of women, it’s a lot of strong women. These women are the antithesis of what we might expect from a patriarchal society...
Bible Review, February 2003
The period from the time of the Judges to the end of the Israelite monarchy is known in archaeological terms as the Iron Age. It is subdivided into Iron I, the time of the Judges from about 1200 to 1000 B.C., and Iron II, the United and...
Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1989
When he found it, Ofer Broshi was on army duty. Army life can be exhausting or boring—or sometimes both. At that moment, Broshi, a rugged young kibbutznik, was more bored than tired. He was resting on the summit of a hill in northern Samaria...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 1983
In the shadow of Mt. Gilboa in the northern Jordan Valley stands one of Israel’s largest, most important archaeological sites—and, until recently, one of the least known. Yet there is...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2000
The publishing house of Simon and Schuster has come up with a radical solution to the problem of "boring" passages in the Bible: Eliminate them.
Bible Review, August 1994
It is easy to “love” the war-ravaged Bosnians, the AIDS-stricken Zaireans or the bereaved of Oklahoma City. But what of the strangers in our midst, the vagrants on our sidewalks?
Bible Review, August 1995
Israel’s priests spoke in rituals, not in words. Their basic values are in the main ethical, and are ensconced in the rituals prescribed in the priestly texts of the Pentateuch.
Bible Review, August 1992
There is a plain, unambiguous meaning to the story: It is about sexual awareness and the creativity of which that is a part.
Bible Review, December 1994