I think you’ve given Miss Kenyon a square deal no matter how high an opinion or esteem I have for her work—and I think she is really superb.

I am renewing my subscription to the Biblical Archaeology Review, though with considerable hesitancy, for I had hoped for something better. In the September number there was an ill-informed article on “Kathleen Kenyon’s Anti-Zionist Politics,” BAR 01:03, side by side with an adulatory article on Yigael Yadin (“Yadin’s Popular Book on Hazor Now Available,” BAR 01:03). Both are outstanding archaeologists, as well as admirable writers for the popular audience, but to suggest that one is open to criticism and the other is not is, to say the least, unfortunate. Kathleen Kenyon was criticized even for her use of the name Haram ash-Sharif, though that has been the name of the area and of the magnificent buildings it contains for thirteen hundred years. She was criticized also for saying that modern taste might not have appreciated Herod’s Temple. What has all this to do with serious archaeology? De gustibus non est disputandum, and there can be little certainty that we would in fact have liked the magnificence of Herodian Jerusalem. Who today, for instance, would have liked a colored Parthenon and a chryselephantine statue of Athene?