On October 23, 1999, Avraham Biran, director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, will celebrate his 90th birthday. He will also have completed his 34th season at Tel Dan, the longest-running archaeological excavation in Israel.

He has led an extraordinary life—as a student, a government official, a diplomat, a dedicated Zionist and, not least, a Bible scholar and archaeologist. His life has stretched over most of the history of modern archaeology in the Holy Land, and he has known and worked with the leading men and women who participated in that history.