034 A leading Egyptologist has recently suggested that the name of the Biblical king David may appear in a tenth-century B.C.E. Egyptian inscription. If correct, this mention of David dates a hundred years earlier than the mention of the “House...

Leviticus bans the Israelites from bowing upon a maskit stone. But what is a maskit? A recently deciphered Assyrian inscription may hold the key to identifying this mysterious prohibited object.

042 042 Not long ago, a clay impression of the seal of a Hebrew king came to light for the first time: The seal of ’Ahaz, king of Judah from about 734 to 715 B.C.E., had been pressed into a...

046 Just as archaeological finds flesh out Israelite history, so they also tell us about Israel’s neighbors and sometime enemies. Such is the case with the Ammonites, a people who lived east of the Jordan and fought in league with the Philistines...

026 In putting together this issue’s article on the Antiquities Problem (“The Great MFA Exposé”), our thoughts turned to unprovenanced objects that can now be studied by scholars because they were bought on the market. If these important remnants...

When the Israelites fled Egypt, they were accompanied by a slew of dubious characters—an odd detail that may lend credibility to the biblical account.

048 049 History has not been kind to some of us. We typically refer, for instance, to the Great Pyramid of Giza, built by the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu during the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2575–2465 B.C...

036 Now that so much attention is being focused on the new excavations around the Gihon Spring and Hezekiah’s Tunnel—which was built as a defense against a siege by the Assyrian leader Sennacherib—it may be time to look at the siege itself...

040 A curious episode in the history of iconoclasm—the destruction of sacred images—took place in eighth-century Palestine (present-day Israel and Jordan). The region’s Byzantine churches were often decorated with colorful mosaic pavements,...

040 At the end of the late Nahman Avigad’s magisterial Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Sealsa appear a number of indices and lists that are not only helpful to scholars but also interesting to thumb through at odd moments. Leafing through the...

030 030 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...

016 017 The impact of Mesopotamian religious thought on the evolution of other ancient religious and philosophical thought has never been seriously investigated. What follows are my initial...

026027 According to biblical law, every 50 years a Jubilee year is to be proclaimed—debts are to be canceled, and property is to be returned to its original owner. How such a year could avoid...

034 Rarely do Biblical texts and extra-Biblical materials supplement one another so well as those that describe the last two decades before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, which marked the end of the Judahite state in 586 B.C.E. As a...

036 The Darius Painter not only recreated the shimmering world of Greek myth on the surfaces of his vases; he also acted as a kind of journalist-bard, painting scenes of historical events as news came in from far-flung places. A Greek-speaker,...

054 We have already established the location of the Herodian Temple in Jerusalem and the altar that once stood in front of it (see the previous installment of this article in “Sacred Geometry: Unlocking the Secret of the Temple Mount, Part 1,”...

020 To say that you should throw out all your books on the archaeology of Jerusalem would be going too far, especially since I wrote two of them.1 But it is true that books on the archaeology of Jerusalem, including my own, now contain a lot of...

The story of Hatshepsut is at first glance simple. She was the daughter of King Thutmose I, wife of King Thutmose II and mother of his daughter, Neferura. Upon her husband’s death (c. 1479 B.C.), she became queen regent of Egypt, ruling in place of the young heir who technically occupied the throne...

018 Last year, on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s, the lead story on the front page of The Boston Globe was not about President Clinton’s impending impeachment trial in the Senate, nor about Saddam Hussein’s effort to shoot...